Stanley Elkin - Boswell

“Who’s there?” I asked, startled.

“James Boswell?”

“Yes. Who is it?”

“It’s Potter, at the desk.”

“Who?”

“Mr. Potter. I’m sorry to bother you at this hour, but there’s a call for you downstairs, Mr. Boswell. It’s a matter of life and death, I’m afraid.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll be right out.”

I put a pair of pants over my pajamas and followed Mr. Potter downstairs. He led me to the phone at the desk and stepped respectfully away from what he thought was my tragedy.

“Hello?”

“Jimmy, it’s Nate. Sorry I missed you before.”

“Yes, Nate, what is it?”

“Jimmy, I told you it was big. Are you ready?” “Sure, Nate.”

“Okay. Can you be at my place tomorrow night about eight?”

“Yes, Nate. I think so. What is it?” “Jimmy, Harold Flesh is in town.”

…like a doctor, perhaps a surgeon, or an engineer, or someone on a committee. The important thing is his aura of conservatism — not respectability, conservatism. He seems to move in a paneled, masculine, conspicuously bookless world, to have come from rooms with bottled ships on their mantelpieces. There would be no guns on his walls though, I think, for he is no hunter. One doesn’t know, finally, what he is, although I got the feeling, hearing him speak, that there is something — what? astrology? Rosicrucianism? the restoration of the Bourbons? — to which, privately, he is deeply committed. It is the measure of how little he is to be trusted that he never talks of this, whatever it is. Nevertheless, when he leaves a place there lingers the smell of something off-center, subversive, wild —what Bruchevsteen calls “the metallic aura of closed systems.”

Flesh is not frank, and one knows instinctively — this is perhaps it — that he is constantly underrating his friends, if he has them, as well as his enemies. Patently, nothing will ever come of this, for he underrates not their talents (he moves in a world of specialists, of the delegation of authority and the division of labor), but their value as persons.

I found myself wondering about him sexually. He is not homosexual — that, at least, would take some sort of passion. I suspect that if he treats with women at all, he is most comfortable with whores. The obvious comparison is to John Sallow, yet there is something wrong here. Whatever one might think of him, Sallow is manifestly a force. Harold Flesh is too clearly only a middleman, someone high and dry within a chaos not of his own creating but which he controls with a mocking impunity and which yields to him in his perverse safety fantastic, endless profit. I was reminded rather of a scion, someone far along in the generations, whose wealth and power, great perhaps as they might be, seem out of touch with that original force which first created and wielded them. The dark-suited son of a distant king, he has hobbies, one supposes, where his fathers had causes, so that finally he seems derived, mutative, some primogenitive fact not so much of nature as of some obscure, still operative law and order.

It was surprising to me to discover how much I disliked him. So rarely do we meet someone of whom we can say positively, “I hate him,” that it is startling when it happens. In addition, I find it an extremely upsetting experience. I am nervous in the presence of my own hatred and behave stupidly.

Perhaps, though, I made him as nervous as he made me, for although there was no apparent reason, he chose to deal with me on a professional basis. He tried to corrupt me. Was I interested in being his bodyguard, he wanted to know.

I had never seen Nate so nervous. He was everywhere, directing everything. Once I saw him begin to fumble with the fastidious Perry’s bow tie, only to abandon it in frustration when he realized it was already correct. To the cook he was unforgivably rude, reducing that man almost to tears and then rushing back five minutes later to offer what was transparently an insincere apology because he was afraid the cook might take it in his head to attempt some damaging revenge. He scolded the waiters for imagined offenses, and even quarreled with the Puerto Rican busboys because he felt they were making too much noise with the silver. After a while, to calm him, I suggested we have a drink together.

“What drink?” he demanded angrily. “Harold Flesh comes to the place in an hour and he tells me to get drunk.”

“I’m not telling you to get drunk. I’m telling you to calm down.”

“Mind your business,” he said. “I’ll throw you the hell out of here. Perry’s right about you.”

“Perry’s a prick,” I said. “Why are you so concerned. about Harold Flesh? What can he do to you?”

“What, you think I’m legal? You think I’m Snow White? Jerk, you been away somewhere? You never heard the word syndicate? The term Mafia is unfamiliar to you?”

“Nate, you’re raving. You’re a nice man with a very expensive restaurant.”

He turned on me, genuinely angry. Before, the first time I had seen him, when I had welched on the bill — that was play. This was real. “What’s the matter, don’t you live in the same world I do?” he said. “Are you from Mars? That’s it, ain’t it, you’re from Mars. From never- never land, and you don’t know the way we do things here. You make me sick, do you understand me? You make me absolutely sick.”

“Nate, what did I do?”

“You make me sick. You do. You got no right, you got absolutely no right to be as big as you are and that stupid. I let you come here. You been to my parties, you meet my friends. You’re a big boy, God bless you, you got an appetite like a horse. I feed you bird tongues would cost a king his fortune to eat them and you don’t know a god-damn thing about me. Who I am, where I come from, how I got this place.”

“You never told me.”

“You never asked.”

“Well, I’m asking. Tell me.”

“I’ll write you a letter.”

“Tell me.”

“I’ll draw you a picture.”

“Tell me.”

“What’ll I tell you? Perry carries a gun? Okay — Perry carries a gun. So does Simmons, did you know that? Simmons carries a gun.”

“In the Mews?”

“Yes, in the Mews. In the Mews! Infant! Baby! There are ladies in this world would sell anything. They sell the outside of their bodies. The inside — the inside, do you understand me? Piece by piece they sell it off, like at an auction. They do not always walk in the streets and stand under lampposts. Sometimes they sit in mahogany captain’s chairs on leather seats. They eat from linen thick as carpets with forks of soft pure silver. There are toothmarks on my spoons. There are doctors who perform illegal operations. I do not speak of men with breadknives and dirty fingernails in rooms behind stores. I speak of men on Park Avenue, in hospital amphitheaters with the best equipment. There are men that push junk, that water the liquor, the gas, the milk, the currency. I do not speak of muggers in parks, of creeps at windows with their hand on their thing, or rapers and queers. There are men that cripple and others that kill, that fix fights and World Series and prices and wars. There are wheelers and there are dealers.”

“If you’re trying to frighten me—”

“Baby! It doesn’t frighten you? I go to the track with these men, we sit in each other’s boxes at the World Series, in Indianapolis for the Five Hundred. In Louisville for the Derby we are on the floors of each other’s hotels, and I am frightened of them.”

“Well, of course. I understand that, Nate. But why?”

“Harold Flesh.”