Stanley Elkin - Boswell

“I will, Morty.”

“It’s easy enough to imagine that he’s a brute, but a lover isn’t always fair.”

“Does Dorothy love you, Morty?”

“We’ve slept with each other just once,” Morty said, “and she was as shy as a little girl. I had to do everything.”

“Poor Morty,” the girl said.

“I fell in love with her the first time I saw her.”

“Poor Morty.”

“Listen, it’ll work out, kid. When two people love each other the way Dorothy Spaniels and I do, nothing can keep us apart. Nothing.”

“She has three kids, Morty,” said the boy at my shoe.

“I love them,” Morty said. “I swear it to you. If I love them there’s no problem. I told Dorothy, ‘I’ll support them, I’ll treasure them as if they were my own.’”

I stood up and started for the door. Morty saw me and ran after me. “Where are you going?” he asked.

“It’s late, Morty,” I said. “I’ve got to get back to my hotel.”

“Well, listen,” he said, “give me a ring in the morning. I’d like to talk to you.”

“Sure, Morty.”

He put his hand on my sleeve. “You think I’m a prick,” he said.

“I don’t know, Morty,” I said. “You’re not careful.”

He took out his little box and started to put some pills in his mouth, then checked his motion and opened his palm and stared at the pills in his hand. “These keep me alive,” he said weakly.

“Then take them,” I said, and left.

Then, today, the strangest thing. When I got up I had a hangover. I am a strong man and unaccustomed to illness or to feeling weak. Because of its rareness I look upon a feeling of weakness as rather an odd sensation— the way other people might react to a shot of novocain.

Despite my hangover I felt a queer relief, a sense of having done with something, of good riddance. This is my invariable reaction when people have disappointed me, as though my growth is in direct proportion to the people I can do without.

This afternoon I went to the park and sat on one of the stone benches across the street from the art museum. It was one of those intense, brightly crisp afternoons that are like certain fine mornings. Ripeness is all, I thought, and wondered what that meant. In the dazzling acetylene sun I was almost but not quite warm.

I had a pencil and some paper with me and I started to write down the names of all the great men I had ever seen. It was exhausting work and soon too much for me. It was easier to put down the names of the great men I had known, but after a while it was even more difficult to decide what I meant by “known” than what I meant by “great.” It was depressing to think that Morty, although we had met less than a week ago, was the only great man I had ever really known. I decided I was being too restrictive, unfair to myself, and began to count the great men to whom I had spoken. There were plenty of these, but how did it mean anything if all I said was “Fine, thank you” to their mechanical “How are you?” on a receiving line? I changed my procedure again and began to write down the names of those men about whom I could say something as a result of our contact. It was soon clear that this wasn’t any more satisfactory than my other attempts. My senses are extraordinarily alive when I am in the presence of a great man. Frequently what he wears or what cigarettes he smokes or whether he smokes at all has almost as much weight with me as anything that happens between us. As real evidence of our contact this is worthless; I could tell almost as much from seeing a photograph. I decided to reduce the list by including only those men I had actually touched, but I soon saw that this made for serious omissions. I had never touched Stevenson, for example; I had never touched Thomas Mann. In despair I was about to throw away all my lists when the solution occurred to me. I made out a list of all those who had said my name.

Although it was Sunday and the day was fine there were not many people in the park. A few women pushed strollers. Occasionally a man with a fat Sunday paper would sit down on one of the benches to read, but the sun was too bright for reading and in a little while he would get up and walk to some more shady spot. Occasionally I heard shouts, and when I looked up I would see a group of boys playing on the wide stairs of the art museum or challenging each other to cross the building’s narrow marble ledges which began at the top of the stairs and framed the thin, pointless bas reliefs which ran like some dark undecipherable script around the building.

I was about to leave the park and begin the long walk back to the Love when for no particular reason I started to watch a compact little family that seemed to have just arrived in the park. There was a woman, a boy of about four, and the father (Why do I say “father”? He was a husband, too.) My attention was compelled — I don’t understand why — by the father. He was about twenty-nine or thirty and he wore a brownish herringbone overcoat. He had on rimless, vaguely archaic eyeglasses. I could see that he was a good, gentle man, someone who had never been in a fight, who had missed the war, who if he didn’t make much money now would one day make more. Though it was the father who had first drawn my attention, as I watched I began to feel strongly about all three of them. The father had a camera with him and was posing his family for photographs, protesting that they must not squint, that the sun had to be over his shoulder and in their eyes if the pictures were to be successful. Once he shouted impatiently at the little boy, who had moved just as he snapped the shutter. He used an old-fashioned box camera and peered seriously into the view finder fixed like a postage stamp in the upper right-hand corner of the camera. He said something I couldn’t hear, and the wife laughed and hugged the little boy. What was impressive were their clothes. All three were immaculately, fashionably dressed, and I had the impression that they were wearing everything for the first time. Perhaps it was this that made me feel so strongly about them, but whatever it was, I watched them with a powerful, unfamiliar emotion.

Pretending that it was an idle, spontaneous motion I got up, stretched and walked absently toward a bench closer to them. I stared at the wife’s wool suit, the soft fur collar around her neck, and at the rich, thick leather of the man’s shoes. The little boy wore knickers, an Eton cap, a white, stiff collar that reflected the sun and a paisley bow tie. The man had managed to purchase for himself and for his family one good thing each of everything, as in a collection of some sort. That was it, of course. He looked after his life, his family, his wardrobe, his apartment, as if he were the curator of some minor but almost definitive collection. Perhaps one room in their home was well furnished. I could see the wall-to- wall carpet, the expensive coffee table, the costly lamp, the custom-built sofa, the richly upholstered wing chair, the single oil painting in the good frame. In the bedroom their mattress had been specially constructed and cost three hundred dollars. They had a set of Rosenthal dishes, and silverware for four, to which they would add. They had all they needed, and a list of all they wanted, and slowly, piece by piece, brand name by brand name, consumer’s report by consumer’s report, they would add to this, fulfilling one dream by a carefully ordered scrapping or postponement of another. They would add as they went along, their way of life a demolishment of empty space, an ethic of filled drawers, closets, rooms, houses, devoted as misers to some desperate notion of accumulation.

The wife had a sort of turban on her head, and this, together with the father’s rimless glasses and the boy’s knickers, lent a peculiarly 1930-ish aspect to the family. But for them there had been no Depression, no war, no bereavement. Almost as if I knew their fate, I realized that the collection would never be completed, that they would grow tired of it first, that the little boy would either die or abandon them. I shuddered to see them. Their substantial laughter, their little private gestures of affection seemed hollow but tremendously brave.