Stanley Elkin - Boswell

Suddenly men, intruders, were holding my arms and pulling me away from my uncle’s grave.

Something has happened. Something is clear. People do not change. I am no believer in epiphanies. What we are is what we come to. Lear dies passionate still. We are stuck with ourselves. Rehabilitation is when you move to a new neighborhood, but some furniture travels always with us, the familiar old sofa of self, the will’s ancient wardrobe, the old old knives and spoons of the personality. Yet something has happened.

Just when I was breaking through! Recently I have had successes. Such successes! Last week I had lunch with Ezra Pound at St. Albans and with Jackson Pollack in New York. Two weeks ago I was in Albany at the governor’s mansion. There have been invitations. Gams. Something is clear, something has happened. Uncle Myles has raised me. He raises me. I learn from death. Grist. Grist and Truth.

To hell with successes. Something is clear. Something has happened. Something is changed. They’re not enough! I have let the great off too easily. Dinners, conversations, two hours in a bar — what is that? What am I, my uncle the corpse? I have let them off too easily. They have taken me into their parlors instead of their lives.

Something has happened. Something has changed. Something is clear.

In Lazaar’s apartment — on the desk, on the piano, on the coffee and end tables, on every surface — there are picture frames from the dime stores. Inside, behind the glass, the figures lean away from the eye, angled to the upright world like any other shadows. The thin tins of the frames are gold or silver; each has the integrity of its cheapness, like some product of our youth freshly seen. I look at one, a somewhat larger frame with wide, mirrored margins down which run extravagant, impossible flowers, lush, red, fantastic as a beanstalk in a fairy story. The pictures are of movie stars in pale, colored tints which resemble the hand-tinting of those years before color photography. The lips are pungent with pastel blood, the skin a kind of grayish pink, like the skins of people with heart disease. The faces are familiar, of course, but strike me somehow as preposterous. Suddenly I understand why. There are Robert Taylor, Gary Cooper, Gable, Barbara Stanwyck, William Powell, Deanna Durbin, Wallace Beery and Humphrey Bogart as they appeared twenty years ago. Paul Muni is a young man. Beneath each photograph is a stamped signature, a flamboyant, meaningless greeting: “Best Wishes from Hollywood, Robert Taylor”; “Musically Yours, Deanna Durbin.” I am oddly moved by the pictures. They might be pictures of things. I ask Lazaar about it.

“The photographs came with the frames. My mother never understood that you were supposed to remove them and put in your own,” he says.

He leads me into the kitchen, and makes tea while I sit on a white wooden chair beside a metal kitchen table. When he opens a cabinet and takes down a cup I catch a glimpse of a strange assortment of patterns. The dishes are familiar, too, the geometry of their designs like something remembered, known always, like a landmark or some permanent combination of old things, its impression stored on the lids of the eyes.

On the kitchen table is a glass sugar bell. Its sides are ridged; it has a chrome lid that screws on. I used to see them in restaurants.

Lazaar puts my tea in a cup and his in a glass. He takes half a shriveled lemon from the icebox and holds it above my cup and squeezes. A few cloudy drops fall into the tea. “Excuse me,” he says. “I didn’t even ask if you take lemon.” He puts the hull in his glass.

There is an open box of Jack Frost sugar cubes on the table. Lazaar takes a cube in his fingers and puts it between his teeth. Like everything Lazaar does, this act seems foreign, faintly unhygienic. I have a vision of Lazaar as a young boy. He is on the toilet. When he finishes, his mother stands over the bowl and stares down into the bowel movement he has made, examining the turds. She wipes him.

I sip my tea. Lazaar makes a slushing sound as he sucks his through the sugar. The heat and the wetness and the sweet taste are palpable for him, tactile, sensual. If I were not there he would grunt in pleasure. It comes to me again how well I understand Lazaar. For all the difference in our experience, for all our difference as persons, we might be Doppelgängers. Even when I am not with him I sometimes see him in some particular situation. I know how it is for Lazaar.

“Do you want more tea?” Lazaar asks. He smiles, his corrupt teeth stained, chipped, like the teeth of some careless animal.

Sweets, I think. I have a sense of all the candy, hundreds and hundreds of pounds of it, that Lazaar has eaten in his life.

“Yes,” I say, “the tea is very good.”

“There’s no more lemon.”

“I’m indifferent to lemon,” I say.

Lazaar laughs. “You’re indifferent to tea,” he says.

It has been so pleasant in Lazaar’s apartment, I have been so content just to sit with him, that I have almost forgotten why I am there. I see that Lazaar prefers me to leave. He knows there will be trouble for me, that I will be drawn in, if he kills himself in my presence. Lazaar is considerate. He is the kindest person I have ever known. Putting the lemon in my tea without first asking if I wanted it was, for him, an almost violent breach of conduct.

“Please,” I say, “I’d like some more tea. I really would.”

I drink four cups, five; Lazaar prepares another pot. I have to urinate but don’t dare leave him alone. Life is absurd.

“Another cup?” Lazaar asks.

“No.”

He sits down across from me and stares at me. I make him uncomfortable. I am rude to be there. Good— good I make him uncomfortable; good I am rude.

“Well, then,” Lazaar says finally, “let’s talk, then. Let’s have one of our conversations.”

“Why? Why, Lazaar? Why?”

“The trouble with you is that you think only in terms of life or death,” Lazaar says.

“What else is there?”

“Please. You’re involved or you’re not involved. I’m not involved.”

“Terrific.”

“Why are you angry? What do you think I ought to want?”

“Age.”

“Well, that,” he says mildly. “That’s easy. Live in a sealed room. Eat what the dietician says. Do moderate exercise. Take all the shots.”

“Sure.”

“Please,” he says patiently, “you’re still caught up in it. Of course you don’t understand.”

“You need a psychiatrist.”

He seems to consider this. “If I wanted to be cured,” he says. “I don’t need a psychiatrist any more than an arsonist needs the fire department.”

“I don’t understand suicide,” I say.

Lazaar looks at me. For a moment he seems genuinely interested, as though I have offered some fresh philosophical position. “That’s because you want to live forever,” he says quietly. I am startled to see the tears in his eyes. I have ruined it; I have ruined his death. He understands that it will bring me pain, that I will not forgive him. “Boswell,” he says, “please. I take no pleasure in my life. It gives me pain. If I could kill my feelings without harming myself I would settle for that. But that’s impossible. To continue to live would be a disloyalty to my needs.”

“I should have called the police,” I say.

“That wouldn’t make any difference. By the time they got to me I would have killed myself. I don’t mean to turn on the gas, to wait for the sink to fill with warm water. You must be made to understand there is nothing you can do to stop me.”

“Then why did you tell me about it? You must want me to do something.”