Stanley Elkin - Boswell

The father took his son’s picture and then his wife’s and then the son and the wife’s together. The wife took her husband’s picture and then a picture of the father and the son. The father changed the film in the camera, going under a tree for the shade, and then came up to me.

“Excuse me,” he said. “I wonder if I could trouble you to take a picture of all three of us?”

“I’m not a very good photographer,” I said. This isn’t true; I have an eye for arrangement.

“Oh, that’s all right,” he said. “It’s just a box camera. There’s not much that could go wrong.”

“All right.”

I asked them to stand beneath a stone lion on the steps of the art museum, the child between them. “Why don’t you put the boy on the other side now, sir?” I said. “I’ll take a picture of you in the center.”

“Well, all right,” he said.

I took the picture.

“Let’s have one with Jerry on your side,” the father said to the woman.

“Is it too much trouble?” the wife asked me.

“No ma’am,” I said. “I’d be delighted.”

I snapped the whole roll. As soon as one picture was taken I suggested a pose for another. The family, contented, let me have my way. I made them stand in certain poses, one foot on a particular step, one arm touching the other’s shoulder at a precisely conceived angle. Suddenly selfless myself, suddenly concerned only to help them, to fix them in some permanently desirable position, to make them, on the steps of the museum, invulnerable as the stone lions, I caught them in all possible arrangements of their love.

Wild to stop time, I ran out of film.

I am awake now because I have been dreaming of this family. It seems the dream has lasted forever. In my dream one by one they sicken and die. Accidents happen to them and they lose their limbs, or passing each other like mechanical horses in a shipboard game, they age jerkily, irrationally, growing older or younger with no regard for the continuity of their relationship to each other. Suddenly the wife is an old woman, though the husband is as I saw him in the park. Or the son is his parents’ contemporary. I see their things age — the Husband’s good belt of soft Florentine leather cracks; the boy’s knickers tear; age erodes their silver. I see some new piece; a hand-carved headboard for the old bed, still in its crate. Now the family reappears; they are of drastically independent ages (though somehow all are old) and are strangely indifferent to each other.

Awake, I remember that in a few years I will be my father’s age when he died.

I’ve been trying to make better use of the daylight hours. Too many of my gams happen at night. People meet me then off the record, off the cuff, in a kind of democracy of evening when their time is discounted.

I’ve been going up and down the high-rent districts — Wall, Madison, Fifth, ducking in and out of Radio City (the scene of those old guided tours; how far I’ve come). I’ve been in the reception rooms now of many of the country’s most prestigious firms, and though I do not always meet I often get a chance at least to see their top men. (It never fails to strike me that these magnificent lives are built on simple profit and loss.) Brashness does not work here. It’s not like the movies. I must subdue myself in order to subdue others. It’s the high espionage of high finance, the subversion of self. Calmness is what these babies pay for.

However, this campaign isn’t organized yet. I have no really firm goals or procedures. Mostly I walk their neighborhoods like a kind of rube, my eyes on the tops of the buildings. On a hunch I pick one and go inside.

Yesterday I spotted a new one, all aluminum and glass, like some colossal upended tray of ice cubes. The impression was that the books all balanced, that I would even be allowed to examine them if I liked. The lobby was vast, a marbled, climateless hall which gave me the feeling that somewhere nearby a spectacular ice show was in progress, or a revival of Porgy and Bess in French, or one of those concerts for children, judiciously Negroed and Puerto Ricaned and Central Park Wested, narrated by this handsome symphony conductor who explained Wagner as though the Walkyries were a kind of baseball team in the American League. This aura had less to do with the building’s architecture, perhaps, than with its state of mind. I felt that above me, in all the offices, suites, executive dining rooms and marbled toilets bright as ballrooms, were men of our time doing the work of our time. It was as if the American Can Company’s vision of the world had finally won through, and that here, throughout this new, light, sleek-angled temple of new materials-through-chemistry, duty and profit mixed and were, at their highest level, one.

I gave in at once. I usually do, of course, but this time I gave in eagerly, turning over my will to the will of the place, the Anglo-Saxon genie god of Western Man who folded out, like a picture in Life magazine. If I had spoken just then my voice would have been low, reverential, like the voice not of the believer himself but of the visitor in an alien church who cannot keep the exaggerated respect out of his tone.

I examined the directory hastily.

There was a tremendous tier of elevators which looked like a solid wall of chrome, a huge, wide block of the stuff, in which, one day, some artist, some Western Man, would chisel the faces of the New Heroes and make of it a fresh Rushmore. Looking at the imposing set of elevators I had the feeling that somehow I would have to book passage, that there were low seasons and high, family plans and excursion tours, and perhaps, despite my feeling of being in a new and better democracy, different classes.

I went up to one of the starters. “The Complex is on what floor, please?”

He looked at me critically. “Which office?” he asked.

“Which office?” I repeated lamely. I stared gloomily at the emblem on his tunic, a highly edited map of the world with the shapes of all the European and Western Hemisphere countries. “Western Civilization, Inc.,” it read.

“Press, Radio, TV, the Magazine? Which department?”

“Oh,” I said. “Executive. Editorial.”

“Do you have an appointment?”

“Yes. Yes I do. I have an appointment.”

“With whom?”

“With — with the Chairman.”

“Gordon Rail?” He looked at my clothes doubtfully, the slacks-and-sportshirt and Toby Tylers in which I meet the world. I look not so much like Western as Bleacher Man.

“Look,” I said, “I’m an ex-dope fiend.”

“What?”

“A junkie. You know — pot, snow, horse, shit. They’re doing a story on me, man. How I had the courage to shake the monkey. You know.”

“Oh.”

“Mr. Rail thinks I’ll be an inspiration to all the other dope fiends. He’s doing the interview himself. You know.”

“Oh.”

“I’m getting five thousand bucks,” I said.

“Oh,” the starter said. He took my arm and led me to one of the elevators. “Thirty-eighth floor, Bill,” he said to the operator.

When the doors closed the world was shut out. Unfamiliar music purred. “Pretty,” I said to the operator.

“It’s on tape,” he said. “A special composition. Lasts exactly seventy-two seconds, exactly the time it takes to get up to the thirty-eighth floor. There’s a whole cycle of these compositions. They’re done by a very famous composer. That’s Stokowski conducting.”

“Is that right?” I said. “Pretty.”

“Sure,” he said. “There are two hundred different compositions. It would take hours of riding in the elevator to hear them all.”