Searches & Seizures

by Stanley Elkin

  “Please,” he said, “you’ll have to leave the pool, Mr. Preminger.”

  “I can’t find the damned bands. I looked everywhere.”

  “Sir,” he said, treading water powerfully and trying to keep his voice gentle, “I’m a college man. I depend on these people for tips. You can petition for a reissue. Why don’t you just get out now?”

  “It’s too goddamn hot,” Preminger said stubbornly. “I’m not getting out.” He turned away from the boy and swam toward the deep end of the pool. Hearing clean, powerful chops behind him, he realized he was being followed. Though he hadn’t raced in years, he tried to get away, but in five strokes the lifeguard caught him.

  “Sir,” he said, “I’m sorry,” and Preminger felt himself captured, the lifeguard’s strong arm across his chest and under his chin. It was an official Red Cross lifesaving hold and it was being used against him! Somehow this was more humiliating than anything that had yet happened, and he began to struggle furiously.

  “That’s right, sir,” the boy whispered, “pretend you’re drowning.”

  Preminger considered the proposition.

  “Help,” he said weakly, “help, help.”

  “That’s it,” the kid said softly, then louder, “it’s all right, sir, I’ve got you.” He felt himself towed sidestroke toward shore. He closed his eyes to avoid the stares of the others, then felt his body scrape bottom at the shallow end. The lifeguard helped him to stand, and with Preminger’s arm around the boy’s shoulder they climbed up the steps. When they were out of the pool he coughed a few times and the lifeguard pounded his back.

  “Thanks,” Preminger said stiffly, “you saved my life. I’ll always be in your debt. How can I ever repay you?”

  “Sir, forget it,” the kid shouted, “it’s my job. It’s all in a day’s work.” They shook hands formally and Preminger started back to the apartment.

  He passed the fat woman. “Faker,” she hissed, “you weren’t drownding.”

  “I was,” Preminger said, “I was drownding.”

  Pride, he thought in the apartment afterwards, his chest still constricted from the encounter: the Preminger Curse. There was a floating fury in the low-keyed man, Preminger’s underground river. A health factor like a trick knee or a predisposition to allergy. Preminger the Proud, Seismological Preminger, quite simply blew up at a snub or humiliation. He exploded, bunched other men’s lapels in his fists, slapped faces like a duelist or slammed out incoherencies like a talker in tongues. Why did underwriters ignore it on forms? He took that as a snub!

  It was a form of snub that had brought on his heart attack. He had gone to keep an appointment with his agent, in his creased, cuffed slacks and open shirt out of uniform beside the lightly summer suited men who rode with him in the elevator. When the operator shut the doors Preminger had sneezed, a tearing detonation too sudden for handkerchiefs, that had come on him like a mugger and left his nose looping viscous ropes like pulleys of mucus. The others made an alarmed nimbus of space around him, like dancers in night clubs for the turns of a virtuoso, while Preminger, panicking, palmed vast handfuls of the stuff and shoved it into his pockets as though it were money picked up in the street. Then the operator turned to him. He’s going to say “Gesundheit,” Preminger thought gratefully; he’s going to turn it into a joke. “What floor do you want?” the man said, and Preminger was on him, his anger bigger than the sneeze itself. “You never asked them, you son of a bitch. You ask them, you cheap fuckshit, you goddamn errand boy, you ass stink and cunt grease,” punching him about the head and shoulders with all his might, leaving sticky wisps of snot where he struck. His heart stopped him before the others could and he collapsed on the floor of the elevator.

  Now he took his pulse—twenty-seven for fifteen seconds, four times twenty-seven’s a hundred eight—and swallowed two Valiums. Recognizing his vulnerability he could do nothing about it. On the mourner’s bench (despite the fact that he was no longer sitting shivah, he continued to go there as to a neutral corner) he cursed the lifeguard, wishing him dead, mutilated, cramped and drowning in his pool, electrocuted by a faulty underwater light. Only his anger, hair of the dog, calmed him, and gradually he steadied down. “I must be nuts,” he said aloud. “I’m a crazy.” He thought of himself in the elevator in the crummy pants and shirt, his shabby shoes, of pushing past the lifeguard to jump naked-wristed into the swimming pool. Jesus, he thought, if I don’t stop violating the dress codes I’m a dead man. Where do I get my fury? he wondered. What nutty notions of my character come on me? What is it with me? Where do I think I am—where three roads meet?

  The phone rang. It was Evelyn Riker. She called to tell him that she’d found his father’s blue wristband. “It was wrapped around the letters in the box. I was upset or I would have noticed.”

  “So you heard about that, did you?”

  “I heard you almost drowned.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll put it in an envelope and leave it for you at the office.”

  “Yeah, thanks.”

  When he hung up he went to the desk where she’d found the letters. He poked around in it, reaching deep into drawers, and pulled out the five missing red and yellow bands, plus a green band that the lifeguard had not told him about. “This must be the contraband,” he said.

  The shivah had been broken. If he still used the mourner’s bench it was out of some vestigial need for the dramatically reflexive. Now he had a signature, a gesture, a theme, something associated with him, if invisibly. (No one saw him on it.) There was something inexplicably counterclockwise in him like a mysterious effect in physics, as personal and offbeat as a sailor hat indoors on a businessman. Watching the color TV from the mourner’s bench, his bare feet—for comfort now—extended, he thought that perhaps he could establish a Premingerian trend, a fad, a novelty, a first. He would bring mourner’s benches back into the living room. Though, again, no one saw him. He leaped to his feet if the bell rang, if there was a knock on the door, if the telephone sounded, and remained there several minutes after his visitor had gone or the phone had been replaced. What the occasional delivery person, the rare condolence caller from the South Side saw was the vacant bench itself, looking in its woody contact-paper like something left behind after a child’s log cabin has been struck. If the style caught on it would be brought back to the world misunderstood, like a Balkan mannerism or Asian idiom. To all eyes he seemed to steer clear, giving a wide berth to the bench.

  Two nights following his little drama at the pool, the night his shivah would formally have ended had he not already suspended it, he had visitors. Seven men and four women, a jury of his peers manqué. Not individually familiar to him, though he thought he might have seen a few of them and one or two might even have been in his house, he recognized even before they spoke that they had come as a group. His behind still tingled with the austere, ghostly caress of the hard mourner’s bench and he felt a sort of mixed curiosity and low-intensity outrage at the sight of them. How dare these people, so patently a band (the fact that there were so many of them was a sure sign that they had not all been able to make it—and, oh, he thought, what low time is it in my life that I have taken to counting my guests?—who clearly would have had to have arranged this call, who didn’t look like brothers and sisters or husbands and wives or fathers and daughters), take it for granted, after their own elaborate arrangements with each other, that he would be there without first ringing up? Did they count him as he had counted them? Yes, that’s how it was. They had his number.

  “Mr. Preminger, how do you do?” a man hidden behind the others in the corridor said. “We have not yet had the pleasure. I am Mr. Salmi, first president of H.T.R.A., the Harris Towers Residents Association.”

  My God, Preminger thought, the Father of my Condominium!

  “These good people—may we come in?—are associated with me on the Committee of Committees.” Preminger stood aside. “They are chairmen of the various committees that exist in
our condominium to enrich the social and cultural life of the residents, make our bylaws, establish liaison between residents and management, and adjudicate complaints.”

  “I found the wristbands,” Preminger said.

  “Forgive if you will our vigilante aspect. We are here to welcome and invite. Normally, of course, Miriam—Mrs. Julius Schreiber—would have been by to do this, but your father died while Mrs. Schreiber was abroad.”

  “She’s still there,” someone said.

  “So this extraordinary convocation has no purpose other than to bid you welcome and to officially acknowledge the Towers’ sadness at Phil’s—your father’s—passing.”

  “Hear hear.”

  “You know,” Salmi said, “we don’t normally jump all over a new resident like this. Harris Towers is first of all our home; only secondly is it our community. I’m not going to talk a lot of Mickey Mouse to you. We don’t, for example, even have our own flag like a lot of the condominiums do. The management had one designed, but we voted not to fly it. The Stars and Stripes is good enough for us. Still, for many of the residents—I don’t except myself—Harris Towers has provided the first opportunity we’ve ever had to participate on a pragmatic, viable level in the shaping of the quality of the community life. I want to underscore that word ‘participate.’ I’ll be coming back to it, if you’ll bear with me, more than once tonight. May I sit down, Mr. Preminger—Marshall?”

  Preminger waved him to a seat.

  “Listen,” Salmi said, leaning forward, “we’ve got a piece of Chicago here that belongs to us. Do you gather my meaning? What we do with it isn’t anybody’s business but our own. I’m talking about the principle of anything between consenting adults—not on the smut level, you understand. This is a great principle, a great principle. One of the great ideas of Western Man. We can use this place as an ordinary bedroom complex—a home first, I said, you’ll remember—or we can reach out and touch our environment, shape it for good or ill. The choice is each individual’s to make, and the choice is ours. Boy oh boy, I must sure sound corny to you. I must sure sound like a fanatic. But wait, you’ll see. But what am I doing monopolizing? I said ‘participate,’ and I meant participate. Mr. Ed Eisner has the floor.”

  “All I have to say,” said Mr. Eisner, “is I’ve been living here since the place opened. That was January of seventy, and I told my wife a new decade, a new tomorrow. I spoke better than I knew. I never had any desire to lead men. I’ve got an I.G.A. Big deal, it’s a small franchise supermarket, I’m a grocer. I still go to business, but I’m here to tell you that I’m more interested in this place than I ever was in my store. That’s my livelihood, but I’m telling the truth. I should have made this move years ago. I live to come home every night. Weekends are like a vacation for me. I don’t even want to go away anymore. If you ask me, Miriam Schreiber was nuts to go abroad. Not me. I’ve got a community. I don’t mean I have, I don’t mean me. I’m chairman of the Buildings and Grounds Committee. We serve for eighteen months, and my term was up this past June. Let me tell you something, I fought like hell to retain my chairmanship—promises, deals, even a little mudslinging, if you want to know. I said my opponent who happens to live in Center House wanted to use the fountain out front as a private lake. ‘A private lake’—what the hell does that mean? I sweated the election, I ate my heart out. My wife said, ‘Ed, what do you need it, it’s a headache.’ You think I want power? I don’t give a goddamn for power! You think I care about being a big shot? Some big shot. No, what I care about is the buildings and grounds. That the fountain works and the lights are lit in the halls and no one is stuck in the elevator and the crab grass should drop dead. What I care about is that there ain’t no litter and when a rose is planted a rose comes up. I’m on the janitors’ asses like a top sergeant. They hate my guts, but I get things done.”

  The speech was crazily moving. Preminger felt a swell of sympathy for Mr. Eisner, for all of them, though he did not know what to make of their strange call. They spoke to him like evangelists; their eyes shone. He brought chairs from the kitchen for those who were still standing, and found himself nodding at what they said, listening as carefully as he ever had to anything in his life. One by one each had his say. Never had people spoken this way to him, so clearly seeking his approval—more, his conversion, as if without it they would not be able to go on themselves. He felt wooed, bid for at some odd auction, standing by as his value rose and rose, fetching sums undreamed of.

  “I think,” a man said, “he needs a clearer picture of the overall setup.”

  “This is Mr. Morris Barney,” Salmi said. “He edits the house organ, The House Organ, and writes the highly readable column ‘A Story Within a Storey.’ “

  “Three buildings,” Barney said briskly, naming them on his fingers, “North, South and Center. Two of them, North and South, high-rises, sixteen stories, each accommodating one hundred twenty-eight apartments, two hundred fifty-six for the pair. Center House, though only eleven stories high, has twenty-two apartments to the floor or two hundred and forty-two in all. This gives you a total of four hundred and ninety-eight units, a figure carefully thought out by the owners—”

  “We’re the owners,” a woman said.

  “We’re the owners. We are the owners,” Barney told her, “but let’s not kid ourselves, this place didn’t go up by itself and it didn’t go up because of us. Harris is the brains.”

  “A brilliant man,” President Salmi said.

  “—carefully thought out by the owners beforehand, the total falling just two units shy of the number officially designated by the U.S. Government as a project. This eliminates a considerable amount of red tape and static from the FHA should an owner find it necessary to sell. All right, four nine eight units, three zero five of them occupied by married couples—six hundred ten marrieds. Plus a hundred eighteen solitaries—the single, widowed, widowered and divorced, a handful. In addition, seventy-three apartments owned by brothers, brothers and sisters, mother/ child or father/child relationships—two or more people living together as a family with a designation other than married. Two hundred and three of these in all. In only two apartments in Harris Towers are there married couples with children—seven people. All right, here are your figures: six hundred ten man-and-wife; one hundred eighteen solitaries”—I’m a solitary, Preminger thought—“two hundred and three in mixed families and two couples with three children. A total population of nine hundred and thirty-eight people. The median age is sixty-one.”

  “Thank you,” Salmi said, “for a brilliant breakdown.” He turned to Preminger. “Almost a thousand people,” he said. “Many small towns aren’t as large. We’re practically a government,” he said breathlessly. “We’re a microcosm. If we can make it work here, why can’t they make it work on the outside? Do you follow me? The answer is simple. Where are your blacks? Where are your PR’s? The answer is simple, my dear Marshall. There aren’t any. We’re not only a community, we’re a ghetto! You know things, you’re a scholar. Athens was a ghetto. Rome was. For slaves read custodians, read carpenters, gardeners and the three lads in the underground garage. Read lifeguards and the girls in the office and the executives of the corporation and you have the new Athens on the North Side. Twenty-five people, outsiders, twenty-five on the nose to support the life of nine hundred and thirty-eight, one to thirty-seven. Not a good ratio, Preminger. Count police, fire, civil service and spoils appointments in Chicago as a whole and you have one to less than nineteen. How do we catch up? What’s the economics, Mrs. Ornfeld of Budget?”

  Mrs. Ornfeld of Budget looked like all the clubwomen who had ever introduced Preminger to his audiences on the lecture circuit. When she spoke, however, she sounded tougher than any of them ever had, biting off her words like a lady Communist. “Bleak,” she said. “Four nine eight apartments. A maintenance that varies with the size and location of the unit but averages two hundred and fifty dollars a month.” (Were they dunning him, then? Was that what this was
all about?) “Times four hundred ninety-eight makes a nut of one hundred and twenty-four thousand, five hundred dollars. That’s the sum we turn over to Harris each month and which he disburses as expenses and payroll. One hundred and twenty-four thousand five hundred dollars—and its peanuts.” She pronounced the word as if she were shelling them in her mouth.

  “Shall we raise the maintenance?” It was President Salmi. “Shall we, Marshall? What happens when they strike? When the staff strikes? Shall we raise the maintenance? What do you say we each put in an additional fifty a month? The median age here is sixty-one, Barney tells us. We’re approaching fixed incomes. Because we’re a new Athens on the North Side will the foundations help us out, do you think? Shall we nickel-and-dime ourselves and raise the monthly maintenance gradually until the five extra dollars becomes ten and the ten fifteen and the fifteen thirty and the thirty the original fifty we were so afraid of, and the fifty some outrageous figure we can’t even conceive of now? One day it will come to that. It will. It will have to. But wait. I see an alternative. We cut down services. We drain the pool, fire a janitor or two. Run the heat and air conditioning only at peak times. Watch the flowers die. Learn skills, basic mechanics and carpentry and the electrician’s wisdom. Do for ourselves. But! But don’t ask me to be your president! I’ll not preside over such an organization!”

  “Don’t ask me to oversee that sort of budget,” Mrs. Ornfeld moaned.

  “I wouldn’t print such news,” Barney said.

  “So you see, Marsh?” Salmi said. “Are you looking at this picture? Paradise. A paradise these houses and towers. Open not yet two years, a one hundred percent occupancy since barely March. Do you see? Are you watching? Here too is the decline of the Roman Empire, the dissolution of the city-states. How does it feel to be in history?”