Stanley Elkin - Boswell

“Well, dammit, Harley, if it’s not too snobbish for The Fund for the Republic people, I don’t see what you have to be so squeamish about.” My grin had folded into an open smile; I couldn’t keep a straight face; I almost doubled up; my nose was running. Here I was in a phone booth in the Columbus Circle subway station, with the little rubber-bladed fan whirling merrily away, and the light going on and off as I opened and shut the door not fifty feet away from the mad faggot in the stall in the men’s toilet peeping through a hole at the businessmen standing before the urinals; here I was, James Boswell, orphan. Herlitz-placed, Mr. America in second-hand pants, lawful husband of the Principessa Margaret dei Medici of All the Italies, being apologized to by the director of The Ford Foundation.

“Why are you laughing?” Harley asked.

“What’s that? Excuse me?”

“What are you laughing at?”

“Well, you’ll forgive me, Harley, but your remark about snobbishness strikes me as just a little absurd.”

“Does it?” Harley said coolly.

“Well, figure it out,” I said. “You and I are both dedicated to a kind of talent elite. Anyway, Princeton and Palo Alto have been doing this sort of thing, only on a bigger scale, for years.”

Harley thought about that awhile and I thought, It’s grand to swing, it is grand to be a swinger. If it were ever my fate to be executed for something, I would hope they would hang me. Fitting — a broken neck and a hard-on. What more could anybody get from life?

“I’m sorry, Boswell,” Harley said at last. “I’ll certainly take it under advisement, but I can’t hold out any more hope than that at this time.”

“Harley,” I said, “you leave me no alternative. I’m going to The Lace.”

“What’s The Lace? I don’t think I’ve ever heard of The Lace.”

“Now who’s being a snob, Harley?” I said, and hung up.

My conversation with Harley, like my conversation with the pawnbroker, made me feel marvelous. My year of relative retirement had changed me, made me stronger. I could put people off now. It was odd; taking them in and putting them off came finally to the same thing. There was freedom in it. I gazed happily at my shiny, unpressed pants, my windbreaker’s broken zipper. The abuses, I thought proudly, the abuses of adversity. So be it. Amen. If I could not do anything about death I could at least do something about something else, do something about men. Let me at them! I could con the fat cats of the world, the wizards and counselors and generals and poets, the people with power or ideas who lived, I saw, with a terrible unconsciousness, like sleek, expensive, ticking bombs. The progress of a hero worshiper was inexorable. The Italian cynic, Neal Admirari, was right. No man is a hero to anyone he’s been introduced to. I had lived my life as a kind of Irishman, in forests of imagination searching under mushrooms for elves and leprechauns. Now I was entitled to shout that that they didn’t exist. I had earned disbelief. Whee, I thought. Here comes Boswell!

I would have to see Nate, but first I went back to my room. So long as my plan was still unrealized I needed time to relish and contemplate each step. That night I didn’t go back to Margaret. I lay on the bed in my room and listened to a man shout at a woman down the hall. I heard him hit her; I heard her scream. I lay there testing my loneliness, feeling my singleness as one might cautiously put pressure on a sprained ankle. I needed to forget not that I knew Margaret and David and that I had lived with them, but that they had known and lived with me. I had to imagine myself forgotten, dead, someone who had lived seven hundred years before in a country that had kept no records. I had to imagine myself not born yet.

I waited two more days. I took my meals in the Automat during the busy hours and sat next to others who spooned their soup and chewed their sandwiches as if I were invisible. You’ve got to get used to it. You’re a long time dead.

On Thursday afternoon I went to Nate’s. When he saw me in my old clothes he broke into a broad smile. “Margaret’s left him,” he said to Perry. “Margaret’s left you,” he said.

“No,” I said. “Pick up my tabs, Nate.”

“Jimmy, you’re a rich man. What are you talking about?”

“Nate, it kills me. It stifles my creativity.” I told him about the room I had rented. He laughed.

“Pick up my tabs again, Nate.” I had discovered the secret of Nate’s indifference to me since I had married Margaret. Anyone who is around the successful too much develops a passion for the occasional failure. Now I was no longer of any use to him.

“It wouldn’t be the same thing, Jimmy. You don’t need it any more.”

“I need it.”

“Well, a cup of the arctic lichen,” he told Perry, “for Jimmy and me. For auld lang syne, Jimmy.”

Perry muttered something I couldn’t hear and signaled to a waiter standing by an enormous gilt samovar.

“Nate,” I said when Perry had poured our tea, “I’ve got a terrific proposition for you. What did I cost you in the old days? Five hundred, six hundred a year?”

Nate sipped his tea. I picked up my cup and drank from it quickly; it was as awful as I had remembered it.

“Some years a little more, maybe. But that’s a fair average, I’d say.”

“Okay,” I said. “Peanuts.”

“Wait a minute,” Nate said.

“Peanuts, Nate. I’ve got a bank account of my own now. Peanuts are peanuts. I have an idea, Nate, that could cost you twenty-five thousand dollars a year at the very least.”

“Hey, wait a minute,” Nate said.

“Nate, forgive me, you’re a fool.”

“Hey, wait a minute.”

“A fool,” I said. “Short-sighted. You do not see even the topmost E on the eye charts. That E is for eternity, Nate! Where will you spend eternity? Nate? Where will you spend eternity?”

“Hey, wait a minute.”

“What have you got here? A fancy clip-joint. Five forks and spoons in the Michelin Guide. Dorothy Kilgallen puts your name in the papers. The movie stars come after the world premieres. Signed pictures on the wall— Nate with Shirley Temple, Nate with Robert Mitchum, Nate with Jimmy Stewart.”

“Nate with Senator McCarthy,” Nate said. “Nate with John Foster Dulles.”

“Republicans, Nate, Republicans. Where will you spend eternity? It’s nothing. You’re living on borrowed time, do you know that? What do you think history will have to say? That Dag Hammarskjöld once had lunch here? That you turned out the only decent ground-reindeer-horn cakes in New York?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I am talking about history, Nate. I’m talking about history, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Do you even have sons? Do you even have sons? Who gets this place when you die? Perry? You won’t be cold six months when somebody’ll whisper in his ear: ‘Perry’s Place.’ Perry’s Place. It has a nice ring, he thinks; Nate’s dead, I’m alive, he thinks. Perry’s Place. Perry’s Place. Two weeks later your sign comes down and a new one goes up. PERRY’S PLACE. With, if you’re lucky, a footnote: ‘Formerly Nate’s.’ Formerly Nate’s! What the hell kind of write-up is that? I’m talking about history. Do you think that as of today you’re history? Do you think it is even peeping at you as it scans Forty-seventh Street? Don’t kid yourself.”

“I don’t know what you want me to do,” Nate said.

“Nate, have you ever heard of the Algonquin Round Table?”

“Are you nuts? Sure I heard of it. Dorothy Parker, F. P. Adams, Woollcott — that crowd. Sure I heard of it.”

“It was nothing,” I said. “Nothing. Journalists. They had a better press than you. It was in the family. But what I’m talking about is history.”