Searches & Seizures

by Stanley Elkin

  “For God’s sake,” he cried, “look at my hair. Is it longer than yours? Am I wearing bellbottoms? Is anything tie-dyed? I swear to you, I washed my hands before I came to the table.”

  “Drugs. What about drugs?”

  “I take ten milligrams of Coumadin.”

  “You hear? He admits it.”

  “It’s a blood-thinner. I had a heart attack.”

  “Do you smoke Mary Jane? Have you ever smoked horse?”

  “You don’t smoke horse. You inject it.”

  “You know an awful lot about it.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Do you drop acid?”

  “I’m thirty-seven years old.”

  “This boy saved my life,” Lena pleaded.

  “It’s true,” Jack said. “No more.”

  They ate the rest of the meal in silence.

  Afterwards they went back into the living room. Marshall poured himself a very large bourbon. Two of the women went into the kitchen to help Lena with the dishes. A third walked around the apartment and studied the photographs—there might have been a hundred of them—on the Jacobsons’ walls. “Lena, this one of Laurie, it’s very nice. I never saw it.”

  “The one with Milton’s grandson?” Lena called.

  “The blond?”

  “Sherman. Milton’s grandson.”

  “Who’s Milton?” a man asked.

  “Wait, I can’t hear you, the disposal’s on.”

  “I said, who’s Milton?”

  “Milton,” Lena called from the kitchen, “Sherman’s grampa. Paul’s partner’s father-in-law.” She came into the living room, drying her hands on a dish towel. “A brilliant man. And what a gentleman! You remember, Jack, when we were to California and he had us to supper in his home? Brilliant. A brilliant man.”

  “What’s so brilliant about him?” Preminger asked.

  “He’s eighty-four years old if he’s a day.”

  “But what’s so brilliant about him?”

  “He’s brilliant. A genius.”

  “How?” asked Preminger.

  “How? How what?”

  “How is he brilliant? How’s he a genius?”

  “That’s right. He’s very brilliant.”

  “How?”

  “He’s eighty-four years old if he’s a day.”

  “That doesn’t make him brilliant,” Preminger said.

  “I didn’t say that made him brilliant.”

  “I saved your life,” Preminger told her, “I think that entitles me to an explanation of how Milton, Sherman’s grampa, Paul’s partner’s father-in-law, is a genius.”

  “Hey, you,” Jack Jacobson said.

  “No, Jack, he’s right. You want to know why he’s brilliant? I’ll tell you why he’s brilliant. He’s brilliant because he’s got brains.”

  “What sort of brains? What does he think about?”

  “He’s retired. He’s eighty-four years old. He’s retired.”

  “I see. He’s retired,” Preminger said, “does that mean he isn’t brilliant anymore?”

  “He’s just as brilliant as he ever was.”

  “How?”

  “He’s got a house.”

  “He’s got a house? That makes him brilliant? That he’s got a house?”

  “He’s got fifteen rooms.”

  “So?”

  “It’s on a hill. In the Hollywood Hills. On a steep hill. On the top of a steep hill in the Hollywood Hills. They call it a hill. It’s a mountain.”

  “Then why do they call it a hill?”

  “With a private road that winds up the mountain. And when you get to the top there’s his house. With a patio. Beautiful. With a beautiful patio.”

  “How is he brilliant?”

  “I’m telling you. In the patio there are marble slabs. Slabs of marble. Like from the most beautiful statues. And the truck that brought them to set them in the patio broke down on the hill. On the mountain. And the old gentleman was so impatient he couldn’t wait. The driver went back down the hill to get help, but Milton couldn’t wait. Eighty-four years old and he picked up the slab from the back of the truck and put it on his shoulder and carried it by himself up the mountain. It weighed ninety pounds.”

  “Oh,” Preminger said, “you mean he’s strong. You don’t mean he’s brilliant. You mean he’s strong.”

  “I mean he’s brilliant.”

  “How? How is he brilliant?”

  “When his wife saw what he was doing she nearly died. ‘Milton,’ she yelled, ‘you must be crazy. Carrying such weight up a mountain. Wait till the truck is fixed.’ But he wouldn’t listen and went down for another slab. And for another and another. He must have carried eight slabs up the hill. A thousand pounds.”

  “That makes him brilliant? An eighty-four-year-old man carrying that kind of weight up a mountain because he wasn’t patient enough to wait for the truck to be repaired?”

  “Ah,” Lena said, “it was an open truck. He thought people would steal the marble before the driver came back. He worked five hours, six.”

  “What makes him brilliant? How’s he a genius?”

  “Wise guy,” Lena screamed, “when the driver finally got back with the part for the truck Milton couldn’t straighten up. His neck was turned around from where the weight of the slabs of marble had rested on it and he couldn’t move it. He was like a cripple. He couldn’t straighten up. He couldn’t turn his head. They had to put him to bed!”

  “What makes him brilliant?” Preminger was shouting.

  “What makes him brilliant? I’ll tell you what makes him brilliant. He was in bed five months. Paralyzed. The best doctors came to him. They couldn’t do a thing. It strained him so much what he’d done he couldn’t even talk it hurt his neck so. He had a television brought into his bedroom. He watched it all day. Everything he watched. If his family came to him he waved them away. He watched the television all day and late into the night. And his favorite program was Johnny Carson. He stayed up for that. And one night Johnny had on a—what do you call it—a therapist, and the therapist was talking about how arthritics could be helped by exercise and she had this gadget it was like a steel tree. It was set up on the stage and there were bars and like rings hanging from it, and the therapist showed how a person could straighten out a crooked limb or a bad joint by hanging from a ring here and a bar there and stretching like a monkey.”

  “So?”

  “So? So he ordered one and had it set up in his living room. Jack, you remember, you saw it. In the middle of his living room like it was a piece of furniture, and every day he’d practice a little. Then a little more. He’d pull this way and he’d pull that way. And even though it hurt him this brilliant man didn’t give up. He practiced pulling and hanging—eighty-four years old—and finally it began to work. And Milton can turn his head today. He can nod and shake it as good as a person half his age. He can even straighten up a little. So now you know. Wise guy! Now you know why he’s such a brilliant genius. There, are you satisfied?”

  The dinner party changed nothing. He still reported for duty at the pool every morning, and though he rarely climbed the high platform any more, he was able to survey the pool from where he sat beside them gossiping.

  Harris went in for a dip one day. He swam five or six strong laps and took a large bath towel from Preminger’s stack.

  “Mr. Harris,” Preminger said.

  “That felt good. You got it made here, you know that? This is the life.”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Gee, I’ve got to get back to the office. Talk to me in the shower.”

  In the men’s shower room Harris turned on the cold tap and stood under it.

  “What I wanted to know,” Preminger said, “was why you wanted me as lifeguard? Salmi was against me, you said, yet he practically rammed the job down my throat.”

  “Ain’t you having a good time? You want to quit? You’re looking better every day. Terrific tan. I put a tan
like that at a thousand bucks, low season. Some muscle coming out in the shoulders, too. You were sick, this sort of exercise must be opening up your arteries like the Lincoln Tunnel. What’s the matter, can’t you stand prosperity?”

  “No, no, I enjoy it. Until I get going on my thesis again when the weather breaks. It’s good for me. I just want to know why you picked me.”

  “Why you winklepicker, ain’t you figured that one out? Who else was there? Peckerhead, seventy-two percent of these guys still go to business. It’s in the minutes. What have you got to do? Who else was there? How’d it look if I left a vegetable in charge of my pool? If something happened you think that ‘Swimming at Your Own Risk’ shit would be worth boo? You at least look like a man. Dunderbone! What’s wrong with your kopf, my dear young putz?”

  He wants me out, Preminger thought. He wants my apartment for a few cents on the dollar and that’s why he speaks to me like this. I’ll smile. I’ll thank him for his information. I’ll be polite. He wants to get my goat. He wants to get my goat for a few cents on the dollar.

  There was a personal letter for him, the first he’d had since coming to the condominium. As there was no return address, the envelope told him little more than that it had been mailed from Chicago. He waited until he got upstairs to open it.

  It was from Evelyn Riker.

  Dear Marshall (I knew your father so well. We were such friends. I can hardly call his son Mr. Preminger),

  Perhaps you’re wondering why I’ve been so remiss in not writing sooner. Since that day of your father’s funeral I’ve hardly seen you. At the pool, of course, the few times I’ve been there (I’ve been reluctant to be seen at the pool for reasons you will be quick to understand without my going into them here), you’ve seemed so busy that I hesitated to interfere with your duties, or to do more than nod pleasantly, as acquaintances will. I had nevertheless determined to speak to you at the earliest occasion, but each time something has held me back. My bourgeois modesty, you will say, or, less kindly, my petty bourgeois regard for even the faintest blush of scandal. It may be, as anyone who takes the trouble to keep up must know, a permissive society, but not at Harris Towers. For all its underground garages and Olympic size pools and master antennae, Harris Towers has not yet entered the twentieth century. But I digress. I had started to say that I had determined to speak with you at the earliest opportunity, first to clear up any misunderstandings that may have developed between us, and secondly to go on from there to form a firmer relationship based on mutual trust, common interest and, I confess it, the fact that I feel a wide gulf between myself and many of the people here.

  After my husband left me—you did not know that we are separated, and thought that perhaps I was a widow, or even that I went behind my husband’s back, that otherwise I could not possibly have “taken up,” to the limited extent that I did “take up” with your father, but there, I think, you underrate your father, or underrate me—I found Dad’s sympathy and understanding immensely important, whatever that sympathy and understanding may on his part have been inspired by. (I do not impute his motives. If Harris Towers is suspicious, I at least am not. Let that much be said for me.) There are no dirty old men, only lonely and frightened ones. As there are lonely women. (And lonely sons?) But I had not meant to impose my thoughts on you so abruptly and formidably. My pen, I fear, carries me away.

  I had meant to talk to you. But your position, as lifeguard, intimidated me. What would it have looked like? A woman. A young lifeguard? I’d have been better off, if that was in my mind, at the Oak Street Beach, though I would, let’s face it, have had stiffer competition at the Oak Street Beach than at Harris Towers. All the more reason to avoid you here. For these arguments would have been the first ones made by my—our—good neighbors. That’s why I think it a good thing that this Indian Summer of ours must soon end. (Despite the fact that I personally enjoy hot weather and always have. I am one of those who would rather burn than freeze.) You will be able to return to your studies, and I will be able to be your friend on a more ladylike scale—befitting our ages. (I know I’m older, forty-four to your thirty-seven, but there is, when you come right down to it, a less telling difference in our ages—yours and mine—than there was in mine and Dad’s.) So I am glad, as I say, that the season must end, that even now cold air is moving down from Canada, that there’s snow in the Rockies, that passes in the western mountains are already closed. It will be our turn soon—I mean Chicago’s—and when this heat is broken, then perhaps…

  Though that’s selfish. When I think of the many old people here and realize that for some of them it may be the last warmth they will ever know—save for fevers, save for deceptive flushes—I must, in all frankness, pull in my own desires somewhat, abate my wishes. Yet one cannot live with such premises, can one? One must neither gloat over one’s food nor pretend an abstract sorrow that it is not in someone else’s mouth. I have never forced dinners down my child’s mouth by telling her that the starving children of Europe would be grateful to have such food. In that respect, at least, I am no “Jewish Mother.” Which, incidentally, brings me around to a question I have been meaning to ask you since we first met. Have you read Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth? If not, it is highly readable and I strongly recommend it to you. The chances are, however, that you have already read it. My feeling is that while it is very funny, Sophie really rather spoils the book. I do not deny for a moment that such persons exist, though in all probability they exist in no greater numbers than stingy Scotchmen or stupid Polacks. Yet even if they existed en masse their thinking is so superficial that surely no work in which they play so central a role can be really important. Characters should be profound. At least that’s my feeling. I don’t recall seeing this point made in any of the reviews I read, though perhaps in the more learned journals some critics have already said the same thing. If you know of such viewpoints I wish you would let me know about them as it is always a pleasure to see one’s own ideas confirmed and expressed more articulately than one can quite manage oneself. Still, I may be all wet about this. A film I enjoyed and can heartily recommend is Mike Nichols’ Jules Feiffer’s “Carnal Knowledge.” There the characters are all Portnoys—though without their Sophies—who seem hung up in the same way that Alexander was, yet I laughed and laughed it rang so true. Men are sometimes such babies. (How odd it is that “Babe” should be exactly the term used by certain kinds of men when referring to their women!) I was in any event very pleased to see such a strong film from Nichols after his disappointing “Catch-22.”

  Do let me know what you think of some of my opinions as I am anxious to have your views on these matters.

  Very truly yours,

  Evelyn

  P.S. I have been looking high and low for the key to Dad’s—your—apartment. So far I have not had much luck, but something has just occurred to me about where I may have left it, and I am pretty certain I will soon be able to lay my hands on it.

  She has it, Preminger thought; she has the key. She’s only waiting to see how I respond to her letter. He would have called her up at once or gone down the hall and knocked on her door, but slow and easy does it, he cautioned himself. He didn’t want to frighten her. He’d play it her way. He would say that he quite understood, that he had guessed her feelings and for just such reasons as she had elucidated in her letter he had held back and not made any overtures to her at the swimming pool, that he had the same reservations she had about Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth and that while he too had enjoyed “Carnal Knowledge,” she made a mistake if she thought that all men were like that. Some were capable of quite mature relationships. He liked to think that he was one. If she did happen to find the key she must be in no hurry to get it back to him. There was no reason for her to try to send it through the mails. She could, if she liked, bring it over at her convenience. She knew his hours at the pool. Otherwise he was always in, rarely out. He had not known her husband had left her. That was a shock. He couldn’t underst
and a man who could be that thoughtless with a woman as obviously thoughtful and superior as herself.

  He wrote all this out very carefully, making several drafts before he was satisfied, then went to the phone and dictated it to Western Union.

  In the summer’s last days the heat lost its nerve and the temperature, like a failed expedition, began a hasty retreat down the slopes, but the South Tower pool was more crowded than ever, thick with people who had not been in it all summer and who now, in the last week it would be open, found themselves rummaging its waters and equipment, the Styrofoam kickboards, striped polo balls and outlandish toys. Last-flingers—some of them actually on vacation—who out of some deep sentimental instinct, like people who crowd aboard a train they have never ridden but which is about to be taken out of service, they squeezed their feet into rubber flippers, scurried to do one last memorable milestone lap, one final dive, kissed the snorkel, cruised on ribbed, rubber air mattresses. Yet despite this element of the frantic, their overall mood was mellow with reconciliation and detail.

  Beside them at poolside, his distinguishing characteristics as their lifeguard worn thin (as on ocean voyages the initial mysteries of ship and crew diminish with custom and ultimately accommodate themselves to that democracy of voyagers, passenger and sailor both drawing near land, and it suddenly occurs to you that the deck steward also has an address and the captain hand luggage), easy now because here it is autumn and no one has drowned or been seriously in trouble (so he’d saved them after all, standing by like a peacetime army), his pith helmet and whistle nothing more now than bits of eccentric jewelry, Preminger melded into their midst, listening, hearing them, never so comfortable (unless it was driving in that limousine to his father’s funeral), nothing on his mind save their voices, monitoring their babble like a ham of the domestic, listening so hard that he was able to pick out individual conversations.