Stanley Elkin - Boswell

“I suppose if one had the time it would be very worthwhile,” I said.

“Every elevator will have its own cycle one day, except for the lower floors maybe. You can see why it would be impractical for the lower floors.”

“Sure,” I said.

“Right now only thirty through sixty are installed with the service.”

“It’s terrific,” I said.

“Mr. Rail himself commissioned it. Oh, it’s very sound psychologically. You take most elevators. You get into the average elevator, you come on it’s the middle of a song and usually you’re out before it’s over. There’s a sense of incompleteness, of frustration. There’s something… you know… missing. It could upset you. You’d want to hear the whole tune; you’d worry about it unconsciously.”

“I know what you mean,” I said.

“In a creative place like this precious man-minutes could be lost.”

“Yes.”

“Tum-ta-ta-tum. Tum-tum-ta-ta-tum, tum-tum. Here we are. Thirty-eight. Right on time.”

“Remarkable,” I said.

The doors opened and for a moment I thought I had gone blind. After the brightness of the lobby and the elevator I was unprepared for the dimness that greeted me. I seemed to be in a large room of a deep, profound brown, amid deep, profound brown walls and a deep, profound brown ceiling. My feet sank four inches into deep, deep profound brown carpet. There was no furniture in the room, just deep, profound brown space.

The very bowels of Western Man, I thought, astonished.

After a few moments I became aware that I was not in an empty room. At one end of the place, at a distance of perhaps a little less than the length of a bowling alley, there was a deep, profound brown desk, uncluttered except for a single deep, profound brown telephone. Behind it was a girl, her face washed in a nimbus of sourceless light. I went toward her, moving through layers of soft, sourceless music.

When I was closer I saw that the girl was beautiful, the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. She had a face like Laura on a train that is passing through, and even before she spoke I knew what that voice would sound like. It would be a mature blend of Bronx and London drawing room, intelligent and sexy and comfortable and a little hoarse — the voice of a girl who had quit Vassar or Smith or Radcliffe in her sophomore year, and had slept around and drunk gin neat and toured Europe on a motorcycle and been in air raids and spent evenings of the revolution in sleeping bags on mountaintops with a guerilla leader who had lost an arm. She’d had poems published and once been in love with a bald, fat, sensitive little man who sold insurance door to door in Omaha, Nebraska. She had gone there to have her baby which the beaten-down brain surgeon, later a suicide in Vera Cruz, had given her. She was neurotic and sick and a black-belt judo champion who could play the guitar and the recorder and sing songs in strange, unremembered languages like Babylonian, Urdu, and Red Chinese. She had sat turning tricks in the windows of Amsterdam and been a Gray Lady in a Chicago hospital. She had been stranded during the war once in a low café in Saigon where she sat beneath a chuffing palmetto fan dealing cards to a Japanese general, all the time collecting information which would later be of use to the Allies. A beat Beatrice, she had been the lost love and inspiration of poets and philosophers and kings and to more than a few men of good will who’d had nothing before she met them but their despair. She was four hundred and thirty-seven years old but she looked twenty-six.

We looked at each other and I smiled from across years, in love, inviting her to love me, inviting her to let me screw her right there on the deep, profound brown carpet. She would have let me, I know, if only the light had been better and she could have seen my eyes and realized who and what I was. (That is no argument, of course. They all would.)

Instead, she smiled back and said, “Yes?” It was code if ever I heard code. I understood. It was the most gracious, the wittiest thing any woman had ever said to me.

“Mr. Rail,” I said right back to her. She knew what I meant.

“What is your name, please?” she asked.

“It’s James Boswell. I am James Boswell,” I said, getting several dozen levels of meaning into the remark.

She said something I couldn’t hear, but I knew that it was my name and that she was communicating somehow with inner offices, with upper echelons, that even now the name was being spoken into machines, that cards gave it back unrecognized, professing ignorance.

In a few seconds she turned her head slightly as if in a listening position. “I’m sorry, Mr. Boswell,” she said, “you don’t seem to be on the appointment schedule.”

“I’m not.”

“Mr. Rail won’t see you,” she said sympathetically. It was a kind of warning. It was enough for me that she understood.

“Come away with me,” I said suddenly.

“I can’t do that, Mr. Boswell,” she said.

“Please,” I said. “Say my name. Say ‘Jim.’”

“I can’t do that,” she said.

“Who are you kidding?” I said roughly. I indicated the deep, profound brown space around us. “This isn’t Western Civilization,” I said.

“It’s what we have instead of Western Civilization,” she said. “You know that.”

“Of course.” I gazed intensely at her. “One day I’ll be back,” I said. “One day I’ll have an appointment and be back. Perhaps then.”

“Good luck,” she said. “Good luck… Jim.”

“Yes.”

“Goodbye, Jim.”

In the elevator, going down, I listened carefully to the seventy-two-second symphony. As long as either of us lived, I knew it would be our song.

That scheme I had for suing celebrities and settling out of court was pretty harebrained. It’s different for a girl. If worse comes to worse a girl can always throw a paternity suit at a movie star, but what chance do I have? And unfortunately I’m too damn big for anybody to beat up in a night club. Suing for plagiarism might get me into the offices of one or two network presidents, but there’s no future in that. Too costly. Too risky. Besides, I of all people mustn’t start screwing around with the law.

I’ve been doing all right, I suppose, but it’s slow, it’s slow. I meet these guys one by one and only after fairly arduous campaigns. It’s like doing piecework. One-fell- swoopism, that’s my philosophy. Some sort of club is the only way, I know, but who’s in a position? Of course I might always be able to marry contact the way others marry money — but then I’d have to share. These goddamned community property laws are a menace.

Something has happened. My uncle Myles was buried this afternoon. Launched in his wooden box, he seemed more like some object on loan from a museum than a human being. He is low in the earth now.

I was struck, at the funeral, by how lone a figure my Uncle Myles was. There were mourners — more, I suppose, than I might have expected — but I didn’t recognize many of them. It seems unlikely that this is simply a consequence of our estrangement. He had been an obscure Mason and the Masons buried him and some of them came to see the job they had done. And I recognized his doctor, a man whose presence at his patient’s funeral apparently did not strike him as in the least ironic. He was as professional as ever; this might have been simply another call. Certainly, when he took me aside at the chapel, cautious to steer me wide of the trestle on which my uncle’s coffin lay, to tell me that my uncle had been a gravely — that was his word — ill man for whom medicine could do nothing, it might have been only another diagnostic conference beyond the patient’s bedroom. I remembered these from the time when I still lived with my uncle, and I experienced again the same peculiar mixture of boredom and conspiracy. Oddly, my knowledge of my uncle’s death was simply an extension of my knowledge of his illness. That he could not know of his own death seemed to deepen it somehow, as his naïveté about his sickness when he lived had made that more profound.