Stanley Elkin - A Bad Man

Reckless, reckless people, he thought contemptuously as a new man, obviously an intruder, moved into place beside him. It was a stunning fact, he thought, that whoever the man’s friend was, he would not even be able to talk to him. Watching the man’s eyes, Feldman spotted the friend. The new man looked at him with something like love, and the friend smiled briefly and looked down at his tray shyly.

The others at the table were as conscious as Feldman of the friendship. They smiled openly, fondly, as at lovers who have overcome difficulties and earned a sympathy which costs no one anything. Indeed, Feldman himself felt a fillip of kindredness and had a sense of being at table at a resort, or aboard ship.

So they sat, each man conscious of the number that gave him the right to be there, but each with a little viciousness in reserve, his self-righteousness underwritten by the fact that he could produce his number on demand. However, the viciousness may have been softened by the jeopardy of the intruder and regard for his lover’s boldness, they would, if the need arose, have dissolved in a moment the accidental community which that boldness had made manifest, and brought guiltlessly and quickly to bear their detachment, even the man who had inspired the risk, the surprised friend like the obligationless guest of honor at a party.

Feldman was aware that the enforced silence made the companionship of the two friends somehow deeper, more meaningful. They all felt it. They felt, too, all the significance of the pair’s proximity and were charged with a kind of sympathetic giddiness, a sense of the glowingly unstated, of the imminent. It was just as if someone they did not hear stood behind their backs, or as if, in the dark, they could sense the nearness of walls, the presence of furniture.

Then something happened that had never happened.

“The Talking Lamp is lit,” a voice said suddenly over the loudspeaker, startling them. It was Warden Fisher.

“How did you know where I was? I haven’t seen you since the new assignments,” the friend said.

“I was behind you in the line last night, Joseph. Are you angry?”

“Of course I’m not angry,” Joseph said. “But you took a risk. You could have gotten us both into trouble.”

“I didn’t think about that, Joseph,” the man said gloomily. Then he brightened. “But isn’t it wonderful?” he asked, reaching across the table. “We can talk. It’s a miracle.”

“No. You mustn’t touch me, Bob.”

Feldman wondered how the other men took this. He looked around the table, but no one seemed interested in the pair any longer. They were more concerned with the warden’s announcement, clearly puzzled by the opportunity to talk in the dining hall. They contained themselves, halting in their silences, like inexperienced people asked to give their opinions into a microphone. Then, gradually, they found things to say.

A man leaned toward Feldman and spoke in a low voice. “I thought it was you he come to see, Feldman. It surprised me.”

“No, of course not. I don’t know him.”

The man laughed, and Feldman was conscious suddenly of hips touching his on the crowded bench, conscious of shoulders brushing his own, conscious of hands lifting spoons, conscious of men’s tongues. Under the table someone stroked his thigh.

“Stop it.”

“Sure,” a man said, winking. “You’re not my type.”

“Feldman isn’t anyone’s type,” Joseph said.

Feldman couldn’t eat with them. (I’ll starve, he thought, thinking of the dozens of meals he had still to eat with these men.) Undeclared, in the silence, their friendship — their love — had a certain dignity, and even the imagined possibility of their acts together had a built-in innocence: the allowance one made for life under difficulties, life against odds. Talking, they seemed grotesque. What lay behind it all was more of the same, importunateness, rough will. Probably Joseph did not even care for Bob.

“How long has it been, old-timer,” one man asked a trusty Feldman had seen in his own cellblock, “since the Talking Lamp’s been lit?”

“Not in my time,” the old man said. He turned to the man on Feldman’s right. “You ever know it to happen, Bob?”

“Once,” Bob said. “When Fisher had been here a year,” he said. “Isn’t that right, Joseph?”

“It was on the first anniversary of Fisher’s system,” Joseph said.

Feldman, frightened, perceived something complex and astonishing: Bob and Joseph had been softened. They confronted him, he realized, not as men but as changed men. Feldman saw that very plainly. They might have been old acquaintances with whom he had lost contact for twenty years and suddenly saw again in their acquired differences as in a costume. These softened men had once been dangerous. The length of their terms here proved the violence of their crimes. It meant that if love was what lay behind the efficiency of the warden’s vicious system and made that system work, then it was viciousness that ultimately made love work. Character tumbled, and even these men could not finally hang on to themselves. They’d had the tenaciousness of murderers, of men who took guns in their hands and pulled triggers. But even these — they were talking quietly now, courting sedately — hard cases had proved malleable in the end. Appetite died last; nobody lost his sweet tooth. It was the most nearly immortal attribute of men. As a businessman, Feldman was impressed by the warden’s techniques (What an operation this is, he thought), but as a man he was terrified. Oh, men’s troubles, he thought; that warden, he’ll get me too.

That evening he asked Bisch about his life. For all his apparent formidableness, his cellmate was a gentle man (After all, Feldman thought, he’s a tailor, he makes men’s clothes), and he began to talk about his life as if he had only been waiting to be asked. Telling Feldman of his troubles, the gloomy man seemed to brighten. Feldman remembered the expression. He had seen it before, in his basement when people had come to him for his favors. He had not wanted their stories — only their demands, the swooped desperation of their terrible solutions. But nothing could keep them from talking. They became debaters, makers of speeches, articulating grievances as if they had been statements of policy, listing troubles like logicians posting reasons. On their faces too he had seen the same queer gaiety, the high hilarity of their justifications. It was not gaiety, of course, or even nervousness, but a kind of awe, as if, hearing what they said themselves, they were not so much touched by their griefs as impressed by them. They smiled as they spoke. It was the smile anterior to sin. Priests never saw that smile, policemen didn’t. All confessions were bawled, whined, whispered from trance. Trouble only sounded bold, choppy with detail like the breathless report of a messenger from a burning city.

“She had this infection,” Bisch said. “In her face. She’d get a fever. A hundred. A hundred one. It would swell. My wife’s beautiful face. The gums drained. In her sleep. One night she almost choked on it. It stank. I made her pillows in my shop. She slept sitting up. She wouldn’t let me sleep with her. She was ashamed of the way she smelled. I would wipe her lips in her sleep with a tissue. I flushed it down the toilet. I wanted her to think she was getting better. But I couldn’t wipe the taste out of her mouth.

“The doctor said it was sinus. That’s what they treated her for. But it wasn’t sinus. They gave her tests. All the tests. She was always in pain. She said it was like having cuts inside her mouth. Then they said she had to have all her teeth out. What was she — twenty-eight? She didn’t want to. They weren’t even sure, she said. It changed the face. She had a very beautiful face. The muscles collapse. Something happens to the jaw, the lips. The expression is different. It looks like spite.