Stanley Elkin - Boswell

“Are you really a doctor? What’s wrong with me?”

“I’m very impressed,” Dr. Green said. “Your footman brought me up and let me in. This is a nice place. I like to see the stuff gets a good home.” He tapped the bag. “I’m not at liberty to disclose names,” he said, “but I got a cabinet minister in here. A president. A king!”

“Help Help Help Help Help Help Help Help,” I sang down the scale.

“Come on, where is she?”

“It’s a mistake. Go away.”

“What do you mean a mistake? I don’t make house calls. What do you mean a mistake?”

“Please,” I said. “Please. If you’re a doctor you must have taken an oath to help the sick. Go away.”

“Seventy-five bucks,” the doctor said.

“Bill me,” I yelled at him. The shout raised devils in my chest.

“Well, make up your mind, will you?” Dr. Green said.

“Get out. Now. Get out!” I moved to get up and the doctor backed out quickly.

“Frail as a snail in a pail,” I said when I was alone again. I felt very cold and I got up to pull back the spread. It was April and there was only one thin blanket on the bed. I went to the closet to look for others but couldn’t find any. At the back of the closet, high on a shelf, was a box under some suitcases where some blankets might be, but I hadn’t the strength to move the suitcases. I pulled some of Margaret’s and my clothes off the rod and staggered with them back to bed. I arranged the blanket and bedspread and clothes on top of me, but when I tried to sleep again I was conscious of the smell of cleaning fluid on the clothes. This grew stronger until it filled my nostrils, my head, my throat. At last I could stand it no longer; I knew I was going to vomit, and I tried to push back the heavy clothing. But the weight was enormous, and I threw up on the bed.

I shuddered. “I’m sick. I’m really sick.” At first this seemed genuinely strange to me, but as I thought about it I began to cherish it as a justification. It was as if this one sickness, this one real thing in my life — the smell of the vomit, the quick, cold ache that floated transitionlessly through my body as something blown by the wind — were all that I needed to underwrite my behavior. My body, frailer now than it had ever been, was my credential, my card of identity, my alibi. At last I had a legitimate need. It filled me up; for the first time in my life I began to feel outrage, the ferocious satisfaction of the injured, the framed, the damned. The feeling was at once unfamiliar and conventional, as exquisite as the slaking of a thirst.

Where were Margaret and David? Their absence was only what I should have expected, perhaps, but somehow I hadn’t expected it. Margaret’s insistence that she loved me had been true enough, but no train waited forever. What I might have loved was the train that did. And I understood, too, the David whose pleasure in me derived from a kind of humility used as keenly as a weapon.

Their hatred of me now — that was what their absence must mean — was wrong. What I had suspected about myself never seemed so true. In a way, my hands were as clean as many men’s, cleaner than most men’s. I had done nothing to foster death, nothing to encourage it. Though I had never loved anyone, neither had I hated. I was a genuinely amiable man who recognized something clear, who believed from the first what others were afraid to believe — that it was the nature of love to be forever misplaced. Love was the country bumpkin of virtues. All I had ever wanted was to five forever, without pain.

I was terrified. Now my body was my enemy. If I, like other men, had not escaped pain, at least my pains had seemed — even as I suffered them, when the imagination and the foresight were most dulled — explicable, temporary, almost secular. This was something else, different in kind. My body was pitted, gutted, oozing the fumes of decay. I was on fire.

Where were Margaret and David? I was square with them both now. If their desertion was hard for me it wasn’t because of love, but because they might have done something, fetched a bedpan, changed my linen, brought me drugs. Well, it was true. One’s chickens went away to roost.

I tried to think about it rationally. That Margaret had not taken her clothes meant nothing. She was a Principessa — money was no object. I thought bitterly of how I had failed to scold her for this. For then the presence of her clothes might have meant something; I could imagine her leaving them behind as a gesture. She could be back in Italy now, arranging with the Black Pope himself a decree, a special dispensation. Fixing beyond fixing. People could not make other people happy, I thought, and love was no debt. Yet my wife and son, with their moral U.O.Me’s, would never understand this. They had meant to bring me down with guilt, tirelessly focusing their unspoken accusations like children flashing the sun in your eyes with a hand mirror. Screw guilt. Men died. It was physics, not metaphysics.

I hauled myself out of bed, the vomit suspended in slimy strings from my mouth, and went to the bathroom. It might kill me to shower now, but I couldn’t stand my stink. I undressed clumsily and stood, weaving and ridiculous, before the full-length mirror. I turned on the shower taps full blast; the water felt like heavy knives. Drying myself, I remembered how I had felt fifteen years before in the gymnasium — powerful, and despite my size, almost light. David could beat me now.

I didn’t want to go back into our bedroom; instead I staggered into David’s room and lay on the narrow bed. Margaret had decorated the room. There was simply no sign of him; it might have been a room in a hotel. What it must have cost David, I thought, to have suppressed his sense of beauty, the single coruscation of personality he had allowed himself. How vindictive he was really; how, angry he was. Then I thought, I am a man rankled by human waste, put off by the deflection of self as other men are by high treason. I wondered that David could have misunderstood so much.

I looked sadly out at the dusk gathering like a fog on the windows and fell fitfully into a doze. In my sleep— which was not free of pain — I had the impression that I was being moved through time, past landmarks of evening and night and morning and afternoon, leaving time behind as one left behind the farmhouses one saw through the window of a moving train. But when I woke the dusk was the shade I had remembered it and I wondered whether I had slept at all. I thought I should be hungry; I tried to remember when I had last eaten. It was in the cafeteria when I had pointlessly humiliated the blind man. That was at least two days before, or, if I had slept around the clock, three. I had spent a day in my room on Fifty-eighth Street, and there had suffered the attack.

What a fool, I thought. It was the business of my life to keep on living. I was getting no treatment, no medicines. If what had happened to me was, as I suspected, a heart attack, I wondered why I had not called a doctor earlier, why I had given Green’s name when the doorman asked me if I needed help. The pains were still with me and I wondered what the world’s record was for a heart attack.

I picked up the phone beside David’s bed, but when the girl at the desk asked what number I wanted I realized that I knew no number, that though I could give her the unlisted phone numbers of half the celebrities in New York, I didn’t even know the name of a good doctor.

“Get me the doorman.”

“Roger?”

“Yes. Please. Get me Roger.”

The operator connected me.

“Roger, this is Mr. Boswell.”

“Yes, sir. Feeling better, sir?”

“Not so you’d notice, Roger.”

“That’s too bad, sir.”

“Roger, I need a good doctor. Who do the tenants use?”