Searches & Seizures

by Stanley Elkin

  It was an ancestor of Plympton’s who began the park, and as a result of the care he and his successors put into selecting and arranging the animals, some of the most incredible and lovely juxtapositions in the world are to be found there. (Freddy told me that Henri Rousseau painted his “Sleeping Gypsy” while he was a guest on the estate.) From the beginning a single rule has determined the constituency of the zoo: all the beasts collected there must have appeared on the Plympton heraldry. Lions, bears, elephants, unicorns (“a pure white rhinoceros actually”), leopards, jackals (“One old boy helped to do in Becket, old boy”), pandas, camels, sheep and apes. The family is an old one, the list long.

  Though Plympton and I had known each other for years—we’re the same age—this was the first time I had been invited to Duluth. I drove down with him the next morning, and of course it was not of the fabulous game park that I was thinking—I was not sure I even approved of it—but of Jane. I gave myself away with my questions.

  “She’s ill, you say?”

  “Did I? I thought I said tired. What she told me, anyway. Looks ruddy healthy, in fact. Tanner than I’ve ever seen her.”

  “Is she alone?”

  “What, is there a man with her, you mean? No, no, Ashenden. She’s quite singular.”

  “How did she happen to drop in on you?”

  “I’m not in it at all, dear chap. I’m a businessman and gamekeeper. My life’s quite full. I suppose that may actually have had something to do with it, in fact. She called from Heathrow day before yesterday. Said she was in England and wanted someplace to rest. Lord, I hope she’s not put off by my bringing you down. Never thought of that aspect of it before.”

  “I won’t bother her.”

  “No, of course you won’t,” he said smiling. “Sorry I suggested that. Just thinking out loud. A man concerned with animals must always be conscious of who goes into the cage with whom. It’s a social science, zoology is, very helpful in making up parties. I suppose mine, when I trouble to give them, are among the most gemütlich in Europe. Indeed, now I think of it, I must have realized as soon as I saw you last night that you’d be acceptable to Jane, or I’d never have asked you. Have you known her long?”

  “We’ve never met.”

  “What, never met and so keen?” I smiled lamely and Freddy patted my knee. “I understand. I do. I feel you hoping. And I quite approve. Just don’t confuse your hope with your evidence.” He studied me for a moment. “But then you wouldn’t, would you, or I’d not be so fond of you.”

  “You do understand quite a lot, Freddy.”

  “Who, me? I’m objective, is all. Yearning, I can smell yearning a mile off.”

  “I shall have to shower.”

  “Not at all, not at all. It stinks only when untempered by reason. In your case I smell reason a mile off, too. Eminently suitable, eminently,” he pronounced. “I wouldn’t bet against it,” he added seriously, and I felt so good about this last that I had to change the subject. I questioned him about Duluth, which till then I hadn’t even thought of. Now, almost superstitiously, I refused to think about Jane. Every time he gave me an opening I closed it, choosing, as one does who has so much at stake and success seems within his grasp, to steer clear of the single thing that is of any interest to him. We spoke trivially the whole time, and my excitement and happiness were incandescent.

  “How many miles do you get to the gallon in this Bentley of yours, Plympton?” I asked, and even before he could answer I turned to look out the window and exclaim, “Look, look at the grass, so green it is. That’s your English climate for you. If rain’s the price a nation must pay to achieve a grass that green, then one must just as well pay up and be still about it. Who’s your tailor? I’m thinking of having some things made.”

  When we left the M-4 and came to the turnoff that would bring us at last to Duluth I put my hand on Plympton’s sleeve. “Freddy, listen, I know I must sound like a fool, but could you just introduce us and give me some time alone with her? We’ve so many friends in common—and perhaps other things as well—that I know there won’t be any awkwardness. My God, I’ve been pursuing her for months. Who knows when I’ll have such an opportunity again? I know my hope’s showing, and I hope—look, there I go again—you won’t despise me for it, but I have to talk to her. I have to.”

  “Then you shall,” he said, and we turned onto the road that took us across the perimeter of the estate and drove for five miles and came to a gate where a gatekeeper greeted Lord Plympton and a chauffeur who seemed to materialize out of the woods got in and took the wheel while Freddy and I moved to the back seat, and we drove together through the lovely grounds for another fifteen or twenty minutes and passed through another gate, though I did not see it until we were almost on it—the queer, camouflaged electric fence—and through the windows I could hear the coughing of apes and the roar of lions and the bleating of lambs and the wheezes and grunts and trebles and basses of a hundred beasts—though I saw none—and at last, passing through a final gate, came to the long, curving, beautiful driveway of the beautiful house and servants came to take our bags and others to open doors and an older woman in a long gown—Plympton kissed her and introduced her as his wife, the Lady Plympton I’d never met (“She came with guanacos on her crest, dear fellow, with the funny panda and the gravid slug. I married her—ha ha—to fill out the set”), and he bolted upstairs beckoning me to follow. “Come on, come on,” he said, “can’t wait to get here, then hangs back like a boy at his first ball,” and I bounded up the stairs behind him, and overtook him. “Wherever are you going? You don’t know the way. Go on, go on, left, left,” he called. “When you come to the end of the hall turn right into the Richard Five wing. It’s the first apartment past the Ballroom of Time. You’ll see the clocks,” and I left him behind, only to come to the door, her door, and stop outside it.

  Plympton came up behind me. “I knew you wouldn’t,” he said, and knocked on the door gently, “Jane,” he called softly. “Jane? Are you decent, darling?”

  “Yes,” she said. Her voice was beautiful.

  “Shall I push open the door?”

  “Yes,” she said, “would you just?”

  He shoved me gently inside, but did not cross the threshold himself. “Here’s Brewster Ashenden for you,” he said, and turned and left.

  I could not see her clearly. No lights were on and the curtains were still drawn. I stood in the center of the room and waited for a command. I was physically excited, a fact which I trusted the darkness to shield from Jane. Neither of us said anything.

  Then I spoke boldly. “He’s right. I trust he’s right. I pray he is.”

  “He?”

  “Plympton. ‘Here’s Brewster Ashenden for you,’ he said.”

  “Did he? That was presumptuous of him, then.”

  “I am Brewster Ashenden of the earth, air, fire and water Ashendens and this moment is very important to me. I’m first among eligible men, Miss Löes Lipton. Though that sounds a boast, it is not. I have heard of your beauty and your character. Perhaps you have heard something of mine.”

  “I never listen to gossip. And anyway hearsay is inadmissible in court…ship.”

  I knew she was going to say that. It was exactly what I would have replied had she made the speech I had just made! Do you know what it means to have so profound a confirmation—to have, that is, all one’s notions, beliefs, hunches and hypotheses suddenly and entirely endorsed? My God, I was like Columbus standing in the New round World, like the Wrights right and aloft over Kitty Hawk! For someone like myself it was like having my name cleared! I’m talking about redemption. To be right! That’s everything in life, you know. To be right, absolutely right, one hundred percent correct in all the essentials, that’s all we want. And whoever is? Brewster Ashenden—once. I had so much to tell her.

  I began to talk, a mile a minute, filling her in, breathlessly bringing her up to date, a Greek stranger’s after-dinner talk in a king’s gold palace on an i
naccessible island in a red and distant sea. A necessary entertainment. Until then I had not known my life had been a story.

  Then, though I could not see it in the dark room, she held up her hand for me to stop. It was exactly where I would have held up my hand had Jane been speaking.

  “Yes,” she said of my life, “it was the same with me.”

  Neither of us could speak for a time. Then, gaily, “Oh, Brewster, think of all the—”

  “—coastlines?” I said.

  “Yes,” she said, “yes. All the coastlines, bays, sounds, capes and peninsulas, the world’s beaches scribbled round all the countries and continents and islands. All the Cannes and Hamptons yet to be. Shores in Norway like a golden lovely dust. Spain’s wild hairline, Portugal’s long face like an impression on coins. The nubbed antlers of Scandinavia and the great South American porterhouse. The French teapot and Italian boot and Australia like a Scottie in profile.”

  “Asia running like a watercolor, dripping Japan and all the rest,” we said together.

  “Yes, yes,” she said. “God, I love the world.”

  “There’s no place like it.”

  “Let me wash up on seashores and eat the local specialties, one fish giving way to another every two or three hundred miles along the great continuous coasts like an exquisite, delicious evolution. Thank God for money and jet airplanes. Let me out at the outpost. Do you feel that way?”

  “What, are you kidding? An earth, fire, air and water guy like me? I do, I do.”

  “Family’s important,” she said.

  “You bet it is.”

  She giggled. “My grandfather, a New Yorker, was told to go west for his health. Grandfather hated newspapers, he didn’t trust them and said all news—even of wars, heavy weather and the closing markets—was just cheap gossip. He thought all they were good for, since he held that calendars were vulgar, was the date printed at the top of the page. In Arizona he had the New York Times sent to him daily, though of course it always arrived a day or two late. So for him the eleventh was the ninth or the tenth, and he went through the last four years of his life a day or two behind actual time. Grandfather’s Christmas and New Year’s were celebrated after everyone else’s. He went to church on Easter Tuesday.”

  “Easter Tuesday, that’s very funny.”

  “I love the idiosyncratic; it is all that constitutes integrity. Difference, nuance, hues and shade. Spectra, Brewster. That’s why we travel, perhaps, why we’re found on all this planet’s exotic strands, cherishing peculiarities, finding lost causes, chipping in to save the primitive wherever it occurs—”

  “Listen to her talk. Is that a sweetheart?”

  “—refusing to let it die, though the old ways are the worst ways and unhealthy, bad for the teeth and the balanced diet and the comfort and the longevity. Is that selfish?”

  “I think so.”

  “Yes,” she said pensively. “Of course it is. All taste’s a cruelty at last. We impede history with our Sierra Clubs and our closed societies. We’ll have to answer for that, I suppose. Oh, well…Brewster, do you have uncles? Tell me about your uncles.”

  “I had an Uncle Clifford who believed that disease could be communicated only by a draft when one was traveling at high speeds. He wore a paper bag over his head even in a closed car. He cut out holes for the eyes, for despite his odd notion he dearly loved to travel and watch the scenery go by. Even going up in elevators he wore his paper bag, though he strolled at ease through the contagion wards of hospitals dispensing charity to the poor.”

  “Marvelous.”

  “Yes.”

  “Brewster, this is important. Do you know things? People should know facts.”

  “I know them.”

  “I knew you knew them.”

  “I love you, Miss Löes Lipton.”

  “Jane,” she said. Jane.

  She was weeping. I didn’t try to comfort her, but stood silently in place until she was through. I knew she was going to tell me to open the curtains, for this part of the interview was finished.

  “Open the curtains, Brewster.”

  I went to the bay and pulled the drawstring and light came into the room and flooded it and I turned to the chair in which Jane was sitting and saw her face for the first time. She looked exactly as I knew she would look, though I had never seen a photograph of her or yet been to any of the houses in which her portraits were hung. All that was different was that there was a darkish region under her eyes and her skin had an odd tan.

  “Oh,” I said, “you’ve a spot of lupus erythematosus there, don’t you?”

  “You do know things, Brewster.”

  “I recognized the wolflike shadow across the eyes.”

  “It’s always fatal.”

  “I know.”

  “The body develops antibodies against itself.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s as if I were allergic to my own chemistry.”

  “I know, I know.” I went toward her blinded by my tears. I kissed her, her lips and the intelligent, wolfish mask across her beautiful face. “How much time is there?” I asked.

  Jane shrugged.

  “It isn’t fair. It isn’t.”

  “Yes. Well,” she said.

  “Marry me, Jane.”

  She shook her head.

  “You’ve got to.”

  “No,” she said.

  “Because of this fatal disease? That doesn’t matter to me. I beg your pardon, Jane, if that sounds callous. I don’t mean that your mortality doesn’t matter to me. I mean that now that I’ve found you I can’t let you go, no matter how little time you might have left.”

  “Do you think that’s why I refused you? Because I’m going to die? Everyone dies. I refuse you because of what you are and because of what I am.”

  “But we’re the same. We know each other inside out.”

  “No. There’s a vast gulf between us.”

  “No, Jane. I know what you’re going to say before you say it, what you’re going to do before you do it.”

  “No.”

  “Yes. I swear. Yes.” She smiled, and the wolf mask signal of her disease made her uncanny. “You mean because I don’t know why you refuse me? Is that what you mean?” She nodded. “Then you see I do know. I knew that it was because I didn’t know why you refused me. Oh, I’m so confused. I’m—wait. Oh. Is it what I think it is?” She nodded. “Oh, my God. Jane, please. I wasn’t thinking. You let me go on. I was too hasty in telling you my life. It’s because you’re pure and I’m not. That’s it, isn’t it? Isn’t that it?” She nodded. “Jane, I’m a man,” I pleaded. “It’s different with a man. Listen,” I said, “I can be pure. I can be again. I will be.”

  “There isn’t time.”

  “There is, there is.”

  “If I thought there were…Oh, Brewster, if I really thought there were—” she said, and broke off.

  “There is. I make a vow. I make a holy vow.” I crossed my heart.

  She studied me. “I believe you,” she said finally. “That is, I believe you seriously wish to undo what you have done to yourself. I believe in your penitent spirit, I mean. No. Don’t kiss me. You must be continent henceforth. Then…”

  “We’ll see?”

  “We’ll see.”

  “The next time, Jane, the next time you see me, I swear I will have met your conditions.”

  I bowed and left and was told where I was to sleep by a grinning Plympton. He asked if, now that I had seen Jane, I would like to go with him on a tour of the estate.

  “Not just yet, Freddy, I think.”

  “Jane gave you something to think about, did she?”

  “Something like that.”

  Was ever any man set such a task by a woman? To undo defilement and regain innocence, to take an historical corruption and will it annulled, whisking it out of time as if it were a damaged egg going by on a conveyor belt. And not given years—Jane’s disease was progressive, the mask a manifestation of on
e of its last stages—nor deserts to do it in. Not telling beads or contemplating from some Himalayan hillside God’s extensive Oneness. No, nor chanting a long, cunning train of boxcar mantras as it moves across the mind’s trestle and over the soul’s deep, dangerous drop. No, no, and no question either of simply distributing the wealth or embracing the leper or going about in rags (I still wore my mourning togs, that lover’s wardrobe, those Savile Row whippery flags of self) or doing those bows and scrapes that were only courtesy’s moral minuet, and no time, no time at all for the long Yoga life, the self’s spring cleaning that could drag on years. What had to be done had to be done now, in these comfortable Victorian quarters on a velvet love seat or in the high fourposter, naked cherubs climbing the bedposts, the burnished dimples of their wooden behinds glistening in the light from the fresh laid fire. By a gilded chamber pot, beneath a silken awning, next to a window with one of the loveliest views in England.

  That, at least, I could change. I drew the thick drapes across the bayed glass and, influenced perhaps by the firelight and the Baker Street ambience, got out my carpet slippers and red smoking jacket. I really had to laugh. This won’t do, I thought. How do you expect to bring about these important structural changes and get that dear dying girl to marry you if the first thing you do is to impersonate Sherlock Holmes? Next you’ll be smoking opium and scratching on a fiddle. Get down to it, Ashenden, get down to it.

  But it was pointless to scold when no alternative presented itself to me. How did one get down to it? How does one undefile the defiled? What acts of kosher and exorcism? Religion (though I am not irreligious) struck me as beside the point. It was Jane I had offended, not God. What good would it have done to pray for His forgiveness? And what sacrilege to have prayed for hers! Anyway, I understood that I already had her forgiveness. Jane wanted a virgin. In the few hours that remained I had to become one.