Searches & Seizures

by Stanley Elkin

  I thought pure thoughts for three hours. Images of my mother: one summer day when I was a child and we collected berries together for beach plum jelly; a time in winter when I held a simple cat’s cradle of wool which my mother was carding. I thought of my tall father in a Paris park when I was ten, and of the pictures we posed each other for, waiting for the sun to come out before we tripped the shutter. And recollected mornings in chapel in school in New England—I was seven, I was eight—the chaplain describing the lovely landscapes of Heaven and I, believing, wanting to die. I recalled the voices of guides in museums I toured with my classmates, and thought about World’s Fairs I had attended. The ’36 Olympics, sitting on the bench beside the New Zealand pole vaulter. I remembered perfect picnics, Saturday matinees in Broadway theaters, looking out the window lying awake in comfortable compartment berths on trains, horseback riding on a fall morning in mountains, sailing with Father. All the idylls. I remembered, that is, my virginity, sorting out for the first time in years the decent pleasures of comfort and wonder and respect. But—and I was enjoying myself, I could feel the smile on my face—what did it amount to? I was no better than a gangster pleading his innocence because he had once been innocent.

  I thought impure thoughts, reading off my long-time bachelor’s hundred conquests, parsing past, puberty and old fantasy, reliving all the engrams of lust in gazebo, band shell, yacht and penthouse, night beaches at low tide, rooms, suites, shower stalls, bedrooms on crack trains, at the carpeted turnings of stairs, and once in a taxi and once on a butcher’s block at dawn in Les Halles—all the bachelor’s emergency landing fields, all his makeshift landscapes, propinquitous to grandeur and history, in Flanders Fields, rooms with views, by this ocean or by that, this tall building or that public monument, my backstage love-making tangential as a town at the edge of a map. Oh love’s landmarks, oh its milestones, sex altering place like sunset. Oh the beds and oh the walls, the floors and bridges—and me a gentleman!—the surfaces softened by Eros, contour stones and foam rubber floors of forests, everywhere but the sky itself a zone for dalliance, my waterfalls of sperm, our Laguardias of hum and droned groan. Recalling the settings first, the circumstances, peopling them only afterwards and even then only piecemeal, a jigsaw, Jack-the-Ripper memory of hatcheck girl thigh and night club singer throat and heiress breast, the salty hairs of channel swimmers and buttocks of horseback riders and knuckles of pianists and strapless tans of models—sex like flesh’s crossword, this limb and that private like the fragments in a multiple choice. And only after that gradually joining arm to shoulder, shoulder to neck, neck to face, Ezekielizing my partners, dem bones, dem bones gon’ walk aroun’.

  Yes? No. The smile was still on my face. And there in that Victorian counting house, I, lust’s miser, its Midas, touching gold and having it gold still, an ancient Pelagian, could not overcome my old unholy gratitude for flesh, and so lost innocence again, even as I resisted, the blood rushing where it would, filling the locks of my body. “Make me clean,” I prayed, “help me to make one perfect act of contrition, break my nasty history’s hold on me, pull a fast one at this eleventh hour.”

  A strange thing happened. The impure thoughts left me and my blood retreated and I began to remember those original idylls, my calendar youth, the picnic and berry hunts, and all those placid times before fires, dozing on a couch, my head in Mother’s lap and her hands in my hair like rain on the roof and, My God, my little weewee was stiff, and it was stiff now too!

  It was what I’d prayed for: shame like a thermal inversion, the self-loathing that is purity. The sailing lessons and horseback rides and lectures and daytrips came back tainted. I saw how pleased I’d been, how smug. Why, I’m free, I thought, and was. “I’ve licked it, Jane,” I said. “I’m pure, holy as a wafer, my heart pink as rare meat. I was crap. Look at me now.”

  If she won’t have me, I thought, it’s not my fault. I rushed out to show myself to her and tell her what I’d discovered. I ran over it again to see if I had it straight. “Jane,” I’d say, “I’m bad, unsavory from the word go, hold your nose. To be good subsists in such understanding. So innocence is knowledge, not its lack. See, morality’s easy, clear, what’s the mystery?” But when I stepped outside my suite the house was dark. Time had left me behind. The long night of the soul goes by in a minute. It must have been three or four in the morning. I couldn’t wake Jane; she was dying of lupus erythematosus and needed her rest. I didn’t know where Plympton slept or I would have roused him. Too exhilarated by my virtue to sleep, I went outside.

  But it was not “outside” as you and I know it. Say rather it was a condition, like the out-of-doors in a photograph, the colors fixed and temperature unfelt, simply not factors, the wind stilled and the air light, and so wide somehow that he could walk without touching it. It was as if he moved in an enormous diorama of nature, a crèche of the elements. Brewster Ashenden was rich. He had lain on his back on Ontario turf farms and played the greens of St. Andrews and Burning Tree, but he had never felt anything like Duluth’s perfect grass, soft and springy as theater seats, and even in moonlight green as billiard cloth. The moon, perfectly round and bright as a tennis shoe—he could make out its craters, like the eternally curving seams of a Spalding—enabled him to see perfectly, the night no more than the vaguest atmosphere, distant objects gyroscopically stilled like things glimpsed through the whirling blades of a fan.

  What he saw was like the landscapes behind madonnas in classical paintings—one missed only the carefully drawn pillars and far, tiny palaces—blue-hilled horizons, knolls at the end of space, complex shores that trailed eccentrically about flat, blackish planes of water with boulders rising from them. He thought he perceived distant fields, a mild husbandry, the hay in, the crops a sloping green and blue debris in the open fields, here and there ledges keyholed with caves, trees in the middle distance as straight as the land they grew from. It was a geography of eclectic styles and landscapes, even the sky a hybrid—here clear and black and starred, there roiling with a brusque signature of cloud or piled in strata like folded linen or the interior of rock.

  He walked away from the castle, pulled toward the odd, distant galleries. His mood was a fusion of virtue and wonder. He felt solitary but not lonely, and if he remembered that he walked unprotected through the largest game preserve this side of the Kenyan savannah, there was nothing in his bold step to indicate this. He strode powerfully toward those vistas he had seen stretching away in every direction from the manor. Never had he seemed to himself so fulfilled, and never, unless in dreams, had such seeming distances been so easily negotiated, the scenery changing every hundred yards or so, the hills that had appeared so remote easily climbed and giving way at their crests to tiny valleys and plains or thick, sudden clots of jungle. This trick of perspective was astonishing, reminding him of cunning golf courses, sudden doglegs, sand traps, unexpected waterholes. Everything was as distinctively charactered as foreign countries, natural borders. He remembered miniature golf courses to which he had been taken as a child, each hole dominated by some monolithic feature, a windmill, perhaps, a gingerbread house, a bridge, complicated networks of banked plains that turned on themselves, culs-de-sac. He thought that Duluth might be deceptively large or deceptively small, and he several miles or only a few thousand feet from the main house—which had already disappeared behind him.

  As he came, effortlessly as in any paradise, to each seamed, successive landscape, the ease of his arrivals added to his sense of strength, and each increment of strength to his sense of purity, so that his exercise fed his feelings about his heart and happiness. Though he had that day made the long drive from London, had his interview with Jane (as exhausting as it was stimulating) and done the hardest thinking of his life, though he had not slept (even in London he had tossed and turned all night, kept awake by the prospect of finally meeting Jane) in perhaps forty hours, he wasn’t tired. He wondered if he would ever be tired again. Or less gay than now. For what he felt, he
was certain, was not mood but something deeper, a stability, as the out-of-doors was, as space was. He could make plans. If Jane would have him (she would; they had spoken code this afternoon, signaled each other a high language of commitment, no small talk but the cryptic, sacred speech of government flashing its secret observations over mountains and under seas, the serious ventriloquism of outpost), they could plan not to plan, simply to live, to be. In his joy he had forgotten her death, her rare, personal disease in which self fled self in ultimate allergy. Lupus erythematosus. It was not catching, but he would catch it. He would catch her. There was no need to survive her. Together they would grow the wolf mask across their eyes, death’s big spreading butterfly. It didn’t matter. They’d have their morality together, the blessed link-up between appropriate humans, anything permissible between consenting man and consenting woman—anything, any bold or timid configuration, whatever the one craved and the other yielded, whatever whatsoever, love’s sanctified arrangements, not excluding the deathbed itself. What need had he to survive her—though he’d probably not die until she did—now that he had at last a vehicle for his taste, his marriage?

  He was in a sort of clearing. Though he knew he had not retraced his steps nor circled around, it seemed familiar. He stood on uneven ground and could see a line of low frigid mountains in the distance. High above him and to his right the great tear of the moon, like the drain of day, sucked light. At his feet there appeared the remains of—what? A feast? A picnic? He bent down to investigate and found a few clay shards of an old jug, a bit of yellow wood -like the facing on some stringed instrument and a swatch of faded, faintly Biblical cloth, broadly striped as the robe of a prophet. As he fingered this debris he smelled what was unmistakably bowel.

  “Have I stepped in something?” He stood and raised his shoe, but his glance slid off it to the ground where he saw two undisturbed lumps, round as hamburger, of congealing lion waste. It came to him at once. “I knew it was familiar! ‘The Sleeping Gypsy.’ This is where it was painted!” He looked suspiciously at the mangled mandolin facing, the smashed jug and the tough cloth, which he now perceived had been forcibly torn. My God, he thought, the lion must have eaten the poor fellow. The picture had been painted almost seventy-five years earlier, but he understood from his reading that lions often returned to the scenes of their most splendid kills, somehow passing on to succeeding generations this odd, historical instinct of theirs. Nervously he edged away, and though the odor of lion dung still stung his nostrils, it was gradually replaced by more neutral smells. Clearly, however, he was near the beasts.

  He turned but still could not see the castle. He was not yet frightened. From what he had already seen of Duluth he understood that it was a series of cunningly stitched enclaves, of formal, transistorized prospects that swallowed each other transitionlessly. It seemed to be the antithesis of a maze, a surface of turned corners that opened up on fresh surprises. He thought of himself as walking along an enormous Möbius strip, and sooner or later he would automatically be brought back to his starting point. If he was a little uneasy it was only because of the proximity of the animals, whose presence he felt and smelled rather than saw or heard.

  Meanwhile, quickening his pace, he came with increasing frequency to experience a series of déjà vus, puzzling at first but then suddenly and disappointingly explicable. He had hoped, as scenes became familiar to him, that he was already retracing his steps, but a few seconds’ perusal of each place indicated otherwise. These were not places he had ever been, only places he had seen. Certainly, he thought, the paintings! Here’s Cranach the Elder’s “Stag Hunt.” Unmistakably. And a few moments later—I’ll be darned, Jean Honoré Fragonard’s “A Game of Hot Cockles.” And then Watteau’s “Embarking for Cythera,” will you look at that? There was E. Melvin Bolstad’s “Sunday in the Country” and then El Greco’s “View of Toledo” without Toledo. Astonishing, Ashenden thought, really worthwhile. Uh oh, I don’t think I care for that Constable, he thought; why’d they use that? Perhaps because it was here. Gosh, isn’t that a Thomas Hart Benton? However did they manage that odd rolling effect? That’s really lovely. I’ll have to ask Plympton the name of his landscaper. Jane and I will certainly be able to use him once we’re settled. Now he was more determined than ever to get rid of Franklin.

  And so it went. He strolled through wide-windowed Wyeths and gay, open-doored Dufys and through Hoppers—I’ll have to come back and see that one with the sun on it—scratchy Segonzacs and dappled Renoirs and faintly heaving Cézannes, and across twilled Van Gogh grasses and faint Utrillo fields and precise Audubon fens, and one perfect, wild Bosch dell. It was thrilling. I am in art, thought Brewster Ashenden, pleased to have been prepared for it by his education and taste.

  He continued on until he came to a small jewel of a pond mounted in a setting of scalloped shoreline with low thin trees that came up almost to the water. It was the Botticelli “Birth of Venus,” which, like El Greco’s “View of Toledo” without Toledo, was without either Venus Zephyr, Chloris, or the Hour of Spring. Nevertheless it was delightful, and he took a seat on a mound of earth and rested, thinking of Jane and listening to the sea in a large shell he had found on the beach.

  “I’m glad,” he said, speaking from the impulse of his mood now that his wanderings were done and the prospect of his—their—death had become a part of his taste and filled his eyes with tears, “I’m glad to have lived in the age of jet travel, and to have had the money for tickets.” He grew contemplative. “There has never been a time in my life,” he said, “when I have not had my own passport, and never a period of more than four months when I was not immune to all the indigenous diseases of place for which there are shots. I am grateful—not that I’d ever lord it over my forebears—that I did not live in the time of sailing ships. Noble as those barks were, they were slow, slow. And Dramamine not invented. This, for all its problems, is the best age to be rich in. I’ve seen a lot in my time.”

  Then, though he couldn’t have told you the connection, Ashenden said a strange thing for someone at that moment and in that setting. “I am not a jerk,” he said, “I am not so easily written off. Profound guys like me often seem naive. Perhaps I’m a fool of the gods. That remains to be seen. But answers are mostly simple, wisdom is.” He was melancholy now and rose, as if by changing position he hoped to shake off this new turn in his mood. He looked once more at the odd pool and spoke a sort of valedictory. “This is a nice place. Jane would enjoy it. I wish I still had those two folding chairs the Bank of America gave me for opening an account of five thousand dollars. We could come here tomorrow on a picnic.”

  He did not know whether to go around the pond or cut through the thin trees, but finally determined not to go deeper into the forest. Though he suspected the animals must be all around him, it was very quiet and he wondered again about them. They would be asleep, of course, but didn’t his presence mean anything to them? Had their queer captivity and the unusual circumstances in which they lived so accustomed them to man that one could walk among them without disturbing them at all? But I am in art, he thought, and thus in nature too, and perhaps I’ve already caught Jane’s illness and the wolf mask is working someplace under my skin, making me no more significant here than the presence of the trees or the angles of the hills.

  Walking around the other side of the pond, he noticed that the trees had changed. They were sparser, more ordinary. Ahead he spied a bluff and moved toward it. Soon he was again in a sort of clearing and here he smelled the smells.

  The odor of beasts is itself a kind of meat—a dream avatar of alien sirloin, strange chops and necks, oblique joints and hidden livers and secret roasts. There are nude juices in it, and licy furs, and all the flesh’s vegetation. It is friction which rubs the fleshly chemistry, releasing it, sending skyhigh the queer subversive gasses of oblique life forms. It is noxious. Separated as we are from animals in zoos by glass cages and fenced-off moats, and by the counter odors of human crowds, meltin
g ice cream, peanut shells crushed underfoot, snow cones, mustard, butts of bun—all the detritus of a Sunday outing—we rarely smell it. What gets through is dissipated, for a beast in civilization does not even smell like a beast in the wild. Already evolution has begun its gentling work, as though the animals might actually feel compunction, some subtle, aggravating modesty. But in Plympton’s jungle the smells were uninhibited, biological, profane. Their acidity brought tears to Ashenden’s eyes and he had to rub them.

  When he took his hands away he saw where he was. He had entered, he knew, the last of the pictures. Although he could not at first identify it, much was familiar. The vegetation, for example, was unmistakably Rousseau, with here and there a Gauguin calabash or stringy palm. There were other palms, hybrid as the setting itself, queer gigantic leaves flying from conventional European trunks. The odor was fierce but he couldn’t leave. At his feet were thick Rousseauvian candelabras of grass, and before him vertical pagoda clusters of enormous flowers, branches dangerously bent under the weight of heavy leaves like the notched ears of elephants. Everywhere were fernlike trees, articulated as spine or rib cage, a wide net of the greenly skeletal and the crossed swords of tall grasses. There were rusts and tawns and huge wigwam shapes and shadows like the entrances to caves, black as yawns. The odor was even more overpowering than before, and had he not seen the vegetation he would have thought himself at the fermented source of the winish world. Yet the leaves and grasses and bushes and flowers were ripe. He reached out and touched a leaf in a low branch and licked his hand: it was sweet. Still, the place stank. The smell was acrid, actually hot. Here the forest was made impenetrable by its very odor and he started to back off. Unable either to turn away from it completely or to look at it directly, he was forced to squint, and immediately he had a striking perception.