Stanley Elkin - Boswell

He was in a state of active terror, abandoned to it, yet for all that still trying not so much to deal with it as to preserve it long enough to communicate it to me, his action vaguely heroic, as though I were someone sleeping in a burning house whom he must rouse before he could think of safety for himself. “Nate,” I said.

“The world is not clean.”

“Nate, this—”

“It is not a clean world.”

“I know that. I know it’s not clean. Fixing beyond fixing.”

“So make sense. Be afraid in it.”

“I can take care of myself.”

“Good,” he said. “Good news.”

He took out a cigarette, something I never saw him do in the restaurant, though he smokes heavily at home. His hand shook as he lighted it.

“Nate.”

“Harold Flesh is such a son of a bitch.”

“Why did you want me to see him, Nate?”

“It’s important,” he said. “You know too many movie stars.” He put out the cigarette and stood up. “Have Perry bring you something,” he said and started to go.

“Nate.”

“I have to see. In the kitchen, I have to see.”

“Nate, please. Are you clean?”

He looked at me. “Are you?” I said.

“I’m shmutzic,” he said.

“What can you have to do with Harold Flesh?”

“With him? Nothing. I swear it.”

“But — then why do you care?”

“Because,” he said. “Because I’m like you. He’s a champion, ain’t he? From all walks. If they’re champions you tear up the check. Do you understand?”

“Nate, I don’t believe you. Something is on the line.”

“Ah,” he said. He smiled for the first time. “You chiseler. ‘Something is on the line.’ All right. Good. Just one of the things on the line, just one, is my place. Who needs that kind of trade? Who needs it? If those guys make it a habit to come here they could ruin me. That kind of trade. Cardinals eat here, for Christ’s sake.” He leaned forward. “In this world there are two kinds. Those who still bother to lie and those who don’t. On the average it is safer and more profitable to deal with those who still bother to lie. Perry!”

Perry came to the table. “Bring Mr. Boswell a nice pot of arctic lichen tea.” He left.

I looked around the room. Across from me, in a round wide booth, the red velvet upholstery tufted and buttoned like the canopied bed of a baby prince, a handsome man toasted a lovely woman. Were they clean, I wondered. Sure they were. In a far corner two middle-aged men — they seemed as unsinister as brokers — chatted amiably. Which one pulled the trigger? I studied the well- dressed, decorous women. Which were the expensive whores? I watched the carefully polite men moving self-consciously back in their chairs as the waiters placed food in front of them. Which was Mr. Big?

I settled dreamily into a contented vision of duplicity. I saw everything twice, the chic surfaces over the dry, stale mass, the vital appearance skin-tight across the unhealthy frame. Nate was wrong, of course, but his vision was the comfortable one. It was not a worthy cynicism, only a step beyond child’s play, a fantasy not of good versus evil, of good guys and bad, but the all- embracing comfort of bad guys and worse. It let one off, this view, as original sin let one off, or some sterile notion of environment. No, if anything, the world was too fine, people too good. Who would hold their measly temper tantrums against men who had to die?

In Nate’s Place it was an understandable illusion, an honest mistake. The place was like one of those enormous night clubs in films of the thirties. One automatically dipped the side of one’s jaw before one spoke. Somewhere, one was sure, a code knock would move a wall aside to reveal a casino where people in evening dress gaily gambled and talked about the DA and called their girlfriends “Sister.”

I did not think I wanted to stay to meet Nate’s Harold Flesh. Perhaps he was a bad man, but if he were he would be vaguely comic, too, a type who took himself too seriously or always wore a white carnation or carried a silver dollar for luck. Evil, if it exists, is as rare as virtue. No, it was in making something out of the gray, moral middle ground that greatness lay. That’s why Felix Sandusky, who took flesh and spun it into muscle, was great.

So Harold Flesh, whether he was Professor Moriarty out of Boston Blackie out of Damon Runyon — whether he was, as Nate himself thought he was, the Devil himself— was not someone who could matter very much to me. Horseracing, baseball, boxing. Why, Nate’s devils were boys, children.

I looked again at Nate’s comical room, thinking, sadly, that perhaps it was time to write Nate off as a contact. He had said it himself: I knew too many movie stars. His people were not of that middle distance where things happen. It was too easy to hypnotize myself in my friend Nathan’s nighttime world. As Perry, who only held its leaders’ coats, had — as Nate had. Too easy to get caught up in its real but probably incidental melodrama. Perhaps there were the things Nate said there were in the world, perhaps it was unclean. But it was the humdrum mud in cemeteries which terrified me, not the dust indoors. How little the atrocities Nate described had to do with me anyway, I thought, whose crimes, like most people’s, were merely petty, merely against myself, who picked no pocket, peddled no whore, pushed no dope, did no violence. At that moment it came to me as a revelation that I was just one more good man.

I went to the washroom. The porter did not look at me when I went in and when I left he didn’t get up to brush my jacket. He knew me, knew my circumstances (which in some views are the same). He expected no tip and withheld his services, one more who would deal with me on a professional basis only.

Outside there was a pay phone. I had no change in my pockets. I went back into the toilet and washed my hands slowly in the marble basin. The attendant did not even seem curious at my quick return. He sat reading his paper in his high shoeshine chair, his feet on the brass shoe forms.

“Slow tonight?” I asked.

“Mm-hmm,” he said.

“Tough.”

I could see him in the mirror. He glanced at me for a moment over the top of his paper and then went back to it. Soundlessly I slipped a dime from his plate of change among the bottles of hair lotions and trays of combs and stacks of hand towels on the marble shelf above the washbasin.

“Look,” I said, turning to him, “do you mind some advice?”

He put the paper down.

“Cut your overhead. A guy comes to a place like this, his shoes are already shined.”

“Where would I sit?” he asked.

“Well, that’s a point.”

I started to leave. “Say,” I said, “did you know Harold Flesh is going to be in tonight?”

He smiled. “Not bad,” he Said, “not bad.”

“You know him?”

“He used to pee over at Lou Mizer’s old ‘Monte Carlo’ when I was there.”

“Well, he’s coming in tonight.”

“Not bad,” he said. I pushed the door open. “Mr. Flesh is a good tipper,” he said.

“There are wheelers and there are dealers,” I said and walked out.

I called Penn Station. “When’s the next train to Philadelphia?”

There was one at ten o’clock. I looked at my watch. It was eight-thirty.

In the end, however, I did not go; in the end I had to stay and see him. In the end an important person is an important person.

At about eleven o’clock Perry came over to my table with a message from Nate. “He wants to see you in the private dining room. He wonders if you will take coffee with him at the table of Harold Flesh.”

“Yes, Perry. Thank you.” I got up to go. “Oh, Perry,” I said, “Have you got your gun?”