Stanley Elkin - Boswell

So I walked immune, eternally young, in an oddly suspended autumn, foolish, forgiven, smiling, through the garden. I smiled at the brothers in the tuxedos and the sisters in the evening gowns on the marbled benches, and they smiled back at me. I took drinks from the trays of the servants. They were in formal dress themselves, a gay servitude. Princes, perhaps. In disguise, like myself. Masked playboys. I smiled in coded recognition.

A long-stemmed champagne glass in my hands, I walked through the garden of the Gibbenjoys, in weather preternaturally warm for the last day of October, among trees which had lost their leaves, but which seemed in the strange warm night to have lost them prematurely, like bald twenty-year-olds whose hairlessness — like my gaucheness — was just a joke.

I sat down next to a girl on a stone bench. “Why are you crying?” I said.

“I’m not crying.”

“Then why are you sitting alone?”

“I’m not doing that either,” she said.

“You’re tough,” I said. “All I get tonight are the tough ones. Isn’t anyone tender and vulnerable any more? How do you account for this warm weather? What’s the word you people use — unseasonable. How do you account for this unseasonable unseasonableness? This unreasonable unseasonable unseasonableness?”

“Dry up,” she said, and moved off into the trees.

A youth, I thought. You can’t con youth with youth.

I strolled some more. I interrupted conversations; I started others. Almost everywhere I was welcome. Once I spotted Mrs. Gibbenjoy and ducked behind a tree until she passed by. Another time I saw Hope Fayespringer. I tried to turn away, but it was too late; she had seen me. She shook her head and made shame-shame everybody- knows-your-name with her fingers. I smiled and gave her my caught-with-my-fingers-in-the-cookie-jar special and followed it with my boys-will-be boys-bangsmasher. She sighed deeply and walked away.

At about eleven o’clock the band came out of the house and set up their stands near a fountain and played while people danced among the trees. Servants were on ladders everywhere, hurriedly stringing lights.

I had stopped drinking. I didn’t want to get sick. Throwing up is amusing, too, of course, but not for the person doing it.

I went up to people. “Have you seen Perlmutter?” I asked. “Is Perlmutter here yet?” “Where’s Perlmutter?”

I went up to a dark, Jewish-looking man. “Dr. Perlmutter?”

“Sorry,” he said.

“Sorry,” I said.

Gabrielle Gail was singing a Greek song while the band faked it. As phony as it sounded to me on records, it seemed beautiful there, and I danced in Greek on the lawn while she sang. I raised one leg and turned around slowly on my heel, digging a neat little divot in the Garden of the Gibbenjoys.

“Eureka,” somebody said.

“Is good my dance? You like it?” I said. “In old countrys is used to do all nights. Is ruins grow like flowers in my countrys. Is dig hole with heel once while dance and to discover temples. Like Dr. Morton Perlmutter.”

“Perlmutter’s an anthropologist.”

“Sure, but a terrific dancer.”

Gabrielle Gail stopped singing and I stopped dancing. “Is Perlmutter here?” I asked.

“Over there,” someone said, pointing to a group of people about fifty feet away. From where I stood, they looked like players in a huddle. The moonlight shone on the backs of evening dresses and dinner jackets. Strangely, the formal dress increased the impression that I was looking at some sort of a team of athletes.

“What are they doing?” I asked.

“Listening,” the man said who had pointed out the group. “The little Yid is making a speech.”

I walked toward them. As I got closer I saw that even more people than I thought were gathered around Perlmutter. The ones in the back were standing behind others who sat on the damp grass. I thought about the abandon of the rich, of their scorn for the indelible stains of chlorophyll. Real class, I thought. I moved closer, stalking the group from an oblique angle. (I have learned never to waste an important first view from a conventional position.) I walked past them, tracing behind their backs their semicircle on the lawn. Going by quickly, my gaze fixed on the interstices between their ears, I looked instinctively downward where Perlmutter appeared and disappeared rapidly like an object seen through the pickets in a fence. When I had twice moved past them in this way, I made a place for myself at one end of the semicircle.

My first thought was that something terrible had happened to Perlmutter and that these people had gathered around to watch while he died. He was stretched out in front of me on his belly, moving erotically up and down. In his left hand was a fistful of earth which he kneaded through his fingers.

“Like that,” he said suddenly, sitting up. “None of this occidental crap about beds or anything like that. They’ll screw in rivers, in fields, on the sides of mountains. I’ve seen them nail each other amongst a herd of their sheep, and on the day’s catch from the sea. You understand? Always against some natural background. Never in a house. Now, you noticed I had some earth in my hands. That’s necessary. The man holds one clod and the woman another. They smear it over each other’s organs when they begin and again when they finish. It’s very clear. ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.’”

“That’s amazing,” a woman said.

“What’s so amazing about it, lady?” Perlmutter demanded.

“Well, it’s amazing, that’s all,” the woman said uneasily.

“There I beg to disagree,” Perlmutter said fiercely. “Where are my pills? Where are they? They must have dropped out of my pocket during the demonstration. Who has a flashlight? Darling, run get a flashlight from the house. Ask for the gardener. The gardener has to come out sometimes in the middle of the night after rainstorms to see the damage to the flowers. He’d have a flashlight.”

“Here they are, Doctor,” a man said, handing him a small flat box.

“Thank you.” Perlmutter opened the box and took out two shiny white pills and popped them into his mouth. He waited until they dissolved before he spoke again. “Interesting about these pills,” he said. “There’s a direct correlation between a society and the form of its medicines. In Ur-societies — in no place in my forty-seven published works do I ever use the pejorative word ‘primitive’—among people whose cultures the lady here describes as ‘amazing,’ the medicines are always taken in their raw states. Bark. Herbs. Grasses. Flowers. That’s natural, of course, but I mean they aren’t even cooked. But wait. In cultures like Tahiti where the people have seen Europeans — let’s face it, white men are Europeans — but live apart from them, they begin to prepare the medicines. The bark is scraped, the flowers are pressed for their juices. Now, in only partially industrialized societies, or in economically underprivileged areas like Poland or Nazi Spain, the medicines are almost invariably in a liquid solution. Only in technocracies do you find tablets, pills. Why? It’s no cheaper to prepare a liquid solution than a pill. The only reason for this phenomenon is that a liquid solution is closer to a natural form and has a counterpart in nature — water, sap, flowing lava, et cetera. The pill, however, has no counterpart in nature and thus flourishes only in a society like ours.”

“That’s amazing,” the same woman said.

Perlmutter glared at her. “It’s obvious to me, lady, that you’ve had no formal intercourse either with science or with scientists. Everything amazes you! The world exists as a fiction for you, does it?” He put another pill in his mouth and, impatient for it to dissolve, began to speak thickly, careful not to crunch it with his teeth. He had a very strong New York accent, but pronounced his words, burdened even as they were by the pill, with a distinctness that made me believe English was a second language for him. One felt he might have learned the language and the accent at two different times; he sounded somehow like a ventriloquist who had confused his normal voice with the voice of his dummy. Even in the dim light, and though he was still sitting, I could tell that he was an extraordinarily slight man. His face was clear, and very pale. He seemed indeed a little Yid, everybody’s tailor, everybody’s Talmudic scholar — like someone who still took piano lessons at forty. Nevertheless, his head, brittle as it seemed in the watery light, gave the same impression of weight and value that I had observed in other great men. He had the same odd precision about his body, the same carved aspect to his features, and, despite the fact that he was the only man there not in a tuxedo, the same faint dapperness. Of course, I realized, hadn’t I been thinking in terms of the ventriloquist and his dummy? Of the miniature reproductions of statues? There was something doll-like about the great. Here was a new substance, that’s all, something satirical and a little vicious.