Stanley Elkin - Boswell

“That would be Dr. Mefwiss, sir.”

“Is he a good man, Roger?”

“Yes, sir. He’s a very big man.”

“Far?”

“No, sir, he’s right in this building.”

“Well, would you see that he comes up here, Roger?”

“Dr. Mefwiss doesn’t like to make house calls, sir.”

“Goddamn it, Roger, it’s his own house. I’m too sick to move. Who knows what it’s costing me just to speak to you on the telephone? Get Dr. Mefwiss. Get him. I want Mefwiss.”

“I’ll get him, sir. I’ll get him right away.”

“Yes,” I said. “Oh, Roger? When did you let me in?”

“Yes, sir, that’s right.”

“No, no. When? When did I come home?”

“That would be this morning, sir.”

“Oh,” I said, “only this morning.” I was disappointed that I had not slept around the clock. Was it possible that Margaret and David were just out for the day?

“Thank you, Roger.”

“I’ll get Dr. Mefwiss, sir.”

“Yes. Thank you.”

When I put down the phone I thought of something else Roger might do for me and I picked it up again. “What’s Roger’s extension?” I asked the operator. “I might be needing it.”

She rang, but there was no answer. Roger must have gone for Dr. Mefwiss. “Just let it ring,” I told the girl.

In a few minutes Roger answered.

“What did Dr. Mefwiss say, Roger?”

“Is that you, Mr. Boswell? He said he’d come right up, sir.”

“Fine,” I said. “Thank you, Roger. You may just have saved my life.”

“You’re not to worry, sir. You’ll be all right.”

“Thank you, Roger. Nice of you to say so. Roger, I want you to go to the desk and find out if my rent’s been paid for next month.”

“Your rent, sir?”

“It’s after the twenty-fifth, isn’t it?”

“It’s the twenty-seventh, sir.”

“Our rent is due on the twenty-fifth,” I said. “My wife usually takes care of it. Look, Roger, I’ll level with you. I’m trying to figure out if my wife has left me. I can’t call the desk myself — they’d get too suspicious. I haven’t got a dime of my own, you know. She’s the Principessa, you understand. I didn’t marry her for her money exactly, but let’s not kid ourselves, she pays the bills. You see, if she hasn’t paid up that could mean she doesn’t intend to come back. If the desk found that out they’d try to evict me. I’m in a tough spot — if I’m as sick as I think, I might have to use this place for a while.”

“I see,” Roger said, astonished.

“I thought you might help me.” I lowered my voice. “I haven’t got a dime. I’m this — you know — stud.”

“Really?”

“Oh, sure,” I said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if that wasn’t why I was sick now. The demands that women made! Anyway, I thought you might help me. You won’t make a nickel out of it, but you wouldn’t have to call me Mister Boswell.”

“I see,” Roger said.

“We’d be in it together. You and me against the syndicate that runs this place.” There was a pause as Roger thought about this. “I could tell you stories about those guys that would curl your ears. Tie-ups with gangsters, the fire chief, the unions. Fixing beyond fixing. Deals in flawed cement, watered steel. Stand clear of the building, Roger, when you blow your whistle for a cab.”

“Really, sir?”

“Jim.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You said ‘Really, sir?’ Call me Jim.”

“Jim,” Roger said experimentally.

“A deal’s a deal,” I said. “Look, someone’s at the door. Probably that doctor. Find out about the rent.”

I shouted that I was alone and too sick to move and told the doctor to go down to the desk for a passkey. In a few minutes he returned and let himself in. I told him about my symptoms in detail, explaining about the cough that brought nothing up and the pain in my side and the hunger and the flashes of prurience and the thickness of my urine and the hypersensitivity of my hair ends and finally about the pains I had been having in my chest for the past two days. I tried to tell him about this sense I had of moving through time, but by then the doctor had placed his stethoscope to my chest and was listening to my heart. I waited impatiently for him to finish and then told him again about my disoriented sense of time.

“Hmn,” he said, “Angst. Classical.”

Hmn, I thought. Angst. Popular.

“Frankly, Mr. Boswell, I find nothing the matter, with you,” the doctor said. He was one of those men who, thirty years after the fact, still have the air about them of the Middle-European refugee. “Your heart seems quite sound,” he added.

Dr. Mefwiss told me that examinations in the home were by their very nature superficial and that if the pains did not go away then by all means I must come in for additional tests, but that in the meanwhile he didn’t think there was much to worry about, that I seemed to him somewhat tired and that these symptoms might very well be my body’s way of warning me that it was time to slow down. Here was an opportunity to get some rest, he said, and that if I thought it would help he could leave me some prescriptions for that purpose — tranquilizers, a mild sleeping pill, something for my pain.

“Leave them with the doorman,” I said.

“Yes,” Dr. Mefwiss said. He snapped his case shut and stood up.

“I threw up,” I told him hopefully.

Dr. Mefwiss shrugged.

“Well, thank you very much, Doctor. You can let yourself out, I think, and please don’t forget to return that passkey to the desk.”

When he left I picked up the telephone. “Roger? Jim.”

“Yes, Jim,” Roger said. “How did it go?”

“Ήe doesn’t think I ought to be moved at this time, so he’s not hospitalizing me just now, Roger. He’ll give you some prescriptions for me, I’d like you get them filled right away.”

“Yes, of course,” Roger said worriedly.

“What about the rent?” I asked.

Roger hesitated.

“Come on, what happened?”

“She didn’t pay it, Jim.”

“Ah.”

“Maybe she just forgot.”

“Mind like a trap, Roger. Seven languages. Photographic memory.”

“Well, it’s only two days late. The office didn’t think anything of it.”

“The doctor said I had to rest,” I said wearily. “It’s tiring me to talk.”

“I understand,” Roger said.

“Get the prescriptions filled,” I said. I replaced the phone and then called him back immediately.

“Roger? There’s something else. That doctor… I don’t know. Ask around; something may be fishy. See what you can find out. I don’t have to tell you to be discreet.” I hung up.

Lying there, I had the sense that something which I had not wanted to happen was already beginning. At last I knew what it was. At any time during the past fifteen years someone could have asked me, “What’s troubling you, Boswell?” and I could have answered, “The three- hundred-pound bench press,” “John Sallow,” “A contact in New York,” “The Great,” “The Club,” “Death.” My life had been without real complexity. It had had the classic simplicity of an obstacle course, the routine excitement of anticipated emergencies. I had lived peculiarly untouched by what men call fate, and if I had sometimes missed complexity I had usually been able to see it as a proliferation of passions, something I was unqualified for. If I had ever regarded myself sentimentally, it was as a kind of hero manqué. No one could long grieve for what one was unsuited for by condition and will. No one could cry over unpoured milk. I lived untouched by fate still, but the other thing — complexity — was being gradually forced upon me, and only now was it clear that what I called “complexity” was not so much a proliferation of passions as a diminishment of them, a chipping away at whatever passion one could call his own. It was indeed a heart attack I had suffered, no matter what the doctor said. Real life, if not knowing where one stood were real life, was simply a question of subterranean manipulations, of contrivings, a robbing of Peter to pay Paul. The great thing was to be obsessed, to maintain one’s certainty, to be able to know arrogantly.