Searches & Seizures

by Stanley Elkin

  He heard how each had got his condominium, from the initial examination of the site through the decision to join and the payment of the deposit to the moving in, stations of the legend, infinitely the same, infinitely different and, for him, as compelling as an account of lost virginity. He was moved to offer his own variation. “I’m in probate,” he said with his eyes closed.

  “Taylor was in probate,” someone said.

  “It was different,” said another. “Irene died almost a year before Rose moved in, right after she put down the deposit. Irene never lived here.”

  “Probate’s a technicality. It’s as good as yours.”

  “Possession is nine-tenths of the law.”

  They spoke of individual courtesies shown them by Harris, of cocktail parties given for them when all that had existed of Harris Towers was the architect’s model, of a dance at the Standard Club five years earlier, some of the women in gowns they had bought for the occasion, their husbands in black tie for the only time in their lives save for getting married or for their children’s weddings. “It was beautiful. Freda, wasn’t it beautiful?”

  “Harris had the mayor’s caterer for the evening.”

  Those were the days, they said, when the condominium was just a dream. And Harris the dreamer. A young Aeneas in the myth. Themselves cast as skeptics, historical obstacle, stunned only retroactively by the cutting edge of his bold imagination, like self-confessed victims in anecdote, all admiration now for the force of his enterprise, his vision which had seen the three buildings already standing when all that had existed was an abandoned warehouse surrounded by vacant lot and prairie. They told of his struggles with the bankers and recounted his wheedling, piecemeal favor by piecemeal favor, his concessions from politicos and zoning big shots and, once, how he’d gotten an actual law through the Chicago City Council, the future condominium’s very own legal and bona fide ordinance, signed by Mayor Daley himself. The legend of how Harris had built the condominium, Preminger saw, was only a universalizing of their individual stories about how they’d come to be a part of it. Yet why couldn’t they speak of him that way? And why had they written off his probate, dismissed it as natural order, ordinary sequence? A life had been lost, death was in it. (And at such moments why did he loathe his swim trunks and wish to put by his whistle and scatter his lotions?) And they spoke of how Harris had recruited his prospects, many of the future residents of the place, a laborious, close-order piece of patient scholarship, choosing and rejecting like some Noah of real estate, a brave man hand-picking his crew, sieving the South Side, as if what he proposed were an expeditionary force or a crusade or a mission in history. (Ah, Preminger saw, because he’d inherited it, because it had fallen in his lap.)

  “In nineteen fifty-five he saw that the South Side was going,” said a woman with white hair, “that the colored were making a mockery of the neighborhoods. He understood what was happening to my husband’s business before my husband did.”

  “What, are you kidding? During the war he saw it coming, as far back as that.”

  “He told me that at the I.C. station at sixty-third and Engelwood he saw a family of hillbillies get off the train, shkutzim, low-class whites from the cottonfields, and he knew what was going to happen. This was in nineteen forty-seven.”

  “This was before he had money. This was before the banks would even look at him.”

  “Now they ask him.”

  How comfortable Preminger is nevertheless, how close to sleep. If someone were to call for help now he could not move, his lassitude locking him up in warm baths of the intimate. He lies back on the chaise longue and watches them, sees their heavy busts in profile, the huge passive breasts of other listeners rising and falling, the deep unconscious percussion of their breath. The fat thighs of the speaker, the muddle of hair at her crotch, her legs wide, stately, an abandon that is at once rigid and relaxed like the lines of upholstered furniture. He hopes the heat will last forever. He hopes his bladder will never fill. He wishes never to move, simply to be there always, their talk climbing the white, hairless insides of his arms like flies. Blood moves in his penis as he listens. His clipboard and his scant notes lay abandoned across his knees. He nudges it aside and it falls to the concrete, a heavy weight gone. He loves their voices cracked by age and child bearing, by lullabies and screaming their children out of streets and the paths of cars.

  “Julie never wanted to come here. Julie wanted Florida. He wanted the excitement of the dog track and the jai alai. You know what I got against Florida? I got nothing against Florida. It’s the way they dress. The loud shirts and Bermudas and the cockamamy sailfish on the men’s caps. And the slacks on the women. People our age look foolish dressed like that. You’d think they’d have better sense.”

  “The kids don’t come to Florida.”

  “They come. Christmas they come. They come and they leave the children with you, and then off they go, off like a shot to the Doral and the Fontainebleau, and you’re the baby sitter. You see them at three in the morning when the night clubs close.”

  “All my friends are in Chicago. I’d be a stranger in Florida.”

  Individual hairs of his head stand stirred by their collective breath. He has never been this relaxed, even in barbershops under warm towels. He knows now how much he wants to lie in rooms where others are talking, to graze in orbit round their monologues. If they noticed him something would be lost, his euphoria bruised by their attention. He’s held by these matrons, by their legends of founding, the condominium an Athens, feeding him the only history he has ever cared for. Condominium. He thinks the word. It hums. Mmn. Mmn. Mom is in it. Om is.

  It’s Saturday. It’s Sunday. (Has he eaten? Has he been upstairs at all?) Those who are not widows have been joined by their husbands. (And how pale these are compared to the women, how marked for probate.) He listens, listens. He loves their voices too, the hoarse voices of the men, this one a printer forty years, his lungs damp, mildewed with ink, scratched and scorched by metal filings, enough case in them by now to set a short sentence, loves the guttural bark of the wholesaler in fruits and vegetables, the rumble of the one who has spent his life in underground parking garages, the screech of the man who has supervised kitchens in hotels. The men’s voices fertilize the women’s. Their sounds fuck. The lifeguard merged with the group beside the pool, neither raised above them on the platform nor cruising beneath them in the water doing the lifesaver’s imposing laps, leading his body through a narrow wake like the long welts of allergy, incognito in boxer trunks, in his tanned son-in-law’s body, his arm along one of the heavy metal tables cut to hold a pole that blooms a sunshade. His ass in a cat’s cradle of plastic sling, the tightly wound strips like huge lanyards from summer camp engraving his calves. Many such impressions here—the backs of men’s legs, women’s backs and arms taking the mold, their skins a sort of stationery, raised letter invitations—Preminger wanly concupiscent at these stains of flesh and contact, the pink stripes of blood like foot and fingerprint, like the red hemioval bite of a toilet seat or elastic’s pucker on the skin. Shoeless as a shivah and sockless too, his naked heels crossed on the hot concrete.

  He sees the others. (Sunday rules: the people here all from the single tribe.) The men shirtless, in bathing trunks. Some in a pelt of body stubble the shape of a man’s undershirt, others smoother than women and with incipient, undifferentiated breasts like the uncloven tits of eleven-year-old girls. He sees the lightning strokes of old operations, the zippers and fossils of healed scars. He sees long testicles winking dully in great nests of jockstrap and the multiple vaccinations on the arms of the women, like the seals and stamps of official documents. Much care has gone into selecting their bathing suits. There are no bikinis, no bandanna prints. The women’s suits are one piece, black or the oxydized red of deep rust, only a little white piping running around the suits like a national border. Their feet are squeezed into pumps, the broad heels a sort of clear, frozen aspic with flecks of gold and sil
ver foil floating in them like stars. They do not actually sit together. They sit in small groups, constellations of between three and seven, but arranged as they are, it is as if they are one group, people ringing a campfire, perhaps.

  Preminger’s ears are grown enormous, like deep-dish radio telescopes. He hears everything as he sits, neutrally naked as the rest. Their voices flow into his brain like bathwater filling a tub.

  “I’m telling you, Dave, you think this is an operation? It’s home sweet home and I ain’t knocking it, but I got a kid brother in California who lives in a condominium that would put your eyes out. Half the apartments out there have their own swimming pools.”

  “I’m happy with this one.”

  “Of course. I’m just giving you a comparison.”

  “I don’t want the responsibility of a pool.”

  “I’m not selling you one. I’m just trying to give you an idea of the scope.”

  “I read there’s one going up in New York City—Onassis has one—that’s being built with two sets of corridors.”

  “Two? What for? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Two sets of corridors. One for the residents, one for the servants and delivery people.”

  “Jesus. Wouldn’t you hear them? I mean they’d be moving around like mice in the wall. You’d hear them.”

  “They’d be trained. They’d take their shoes off. You might hear John-John. He’d be running up and down the second corridor with his friends all day. You’d only hear John-John.”

  “Two sets of corridors. That’d mean two sets of elevators too. Christ, the maintenance on a place like that’d have to be twenty-five hundred a month.”

  “Grace, tell me, you still looking for a girl?”

  “Bernadine’s going to give me Fridays.”

  “I thought she goes to Dorothy on Fridays.”

  “We worked it out. Howard’s divorce came through. The judge gave him visitation on weekends. He brings the kids over and leaves them with Dorothy so she needs someone to straighten up on Monday. Bernadine goes to Olive on Mondays and Flo doesn’t need Helen now that Frank isn’t working so she comes to Dorothy on Mondays and I said I’d take Bernadine on Fridays.”

  “Ex-cons I use, retards, wounded vets, all the handicapped.”

  “Me too. That’s what the schmucks who work for me are like.”

  “No, I mean it. It’s good business. They live by the skin of their teeth, those fellas. You never have no labor trouble from them. They don’t ask for raises or fringe benefits. The big fringe benefit is that they’re working at all.”

  “You feel that sun? It’s like a vacation. I tell you it eats my heart out. This is the life. This is the life and I’m going to be sixty-four years old.”

  “You’re as old as you feel.”

  “You know something?”

  “What’s that?”

  “If I was ten years younger I’d be fifty-four. If I was thirteen years younger I’d still be over fifty.”

  “Sunrise, sunset.”

  “Yeah. I think I’ll go in the water. How’s the water?”

  “Terrific.”

  “Cold?”

  “Not once you get used to it. The air is colder than the water.”

  “I’m going in. I got to take a leak.”

  “You got Blissner’s place when he lost his job.”

  “That’s right.”

  “May I ask a personal question?”

  “What I had to give for it?”

  “If you don’t mind.”

  “Thirty-two hundred fifty above cost.”

  “That isn’t bad. It’s the eighth floor.”

  “He asked four thousand with the carpets and drapes. I told him to take them.”

  “So he did?”

  “The drapes. He had to eat the carpets.”

  “All my life I’ve been busy. Now the kids are grown and Lewis sold the store, what do I do with myself? Sure, it’s wonderful to relax and sit by the pool, but that’s five months a year and I’ve got an active mind. What do you do the rest of the time? I thought about this very carefully and for me the answer is volunteer work. There’s plenty of trouble in the world that those who have the time can do something about. We don’t just have to stand idly by. If I can lend a helping hand to those less fortunate I’ve got no right to sit back. Beginning Tuesday I’m recording the weights for my Weight Watchers Club.”

  “My manager’s landlord’s a Pakistani. So Steve, that’s my manager, and Milly are going to Peewaukee for the weekend and they want to leave the baby with the landlord. His wife had made this standing offer when they moved in. So they go down to Mr. Pahdichter and they ask if it’ll be all right and the Pak says—I can’t do his accent like Steve—‘Oh yes. Very good. But does the baby eat, does the baby eat, curry?’”

  “They gave him to eat curry? A baby?”

  “They’re very modern people.”

  “Feldman?”

  “I’m sunbathing. I’m getting a tan.”

  “You’re beautiful. If they had a beauty contest it’d be you hands down. The rest of us wouldn’t stand a chance.”

  “Yeah. Right.”

  “So?”

  “Sew buttons. So? So what?”

  “So when are you going to let me get you on the Johnny Carson show?”

  “That again.”

  “I can do it. I got connections with the higher-ups. When’s it going to be, Feldman? When does America look you over?”

  “A week from Thursday.”

  “What a wit. You really have to let me do it. You could show him how you take a sunbath. They’d introduce you as this big sunbathing expert from the North Side. Johnny’d take his shirt off and everything. It’d be a sensation. You and Johnny with your shirts off. The people wouldn’t know where to look first. You’d tell him when to turn over and he’d do these funny takes. Come on, Feldman. I’ll call up right now if you give me the word.”

  “Why don’t you go on the Johnny Carson show?”

  “Me? What do I know about sunbathing? It’s got to be you.”

  “I still say you should have gone out. You had no right to stay in with two pair.”

  “Queens and jacks?”

  “Gert was also showing a pair of queens. You should have gone out.”

  “It’s my money.”

  “You ruin it for other people, Lenore. You draw their cards. That’s why nobody wants to sit to your left. You asked and I told you. I always say what I think to a person’s face. I can’t be a hypocrite.”

  “Excuse me for living.”

  “Should I call Johnny, or should we wait till he takes the show out to Hollywood where we can get you real sunshine?”

  “We’ll wait.”

  “No, it’s no good. In California sunbathers are a dime a dozen. It’s got to be you and it’s got to be New York.”

  “Never buy a typewriter till there’s ads in Fortune magazine showing some new breakthrough, some terrific advance. Then wait a month and a half and call around the various companies. Chances are they’ll be putting in new equipment and letting their old machines go. This tip works for other industrial equipment as well. Don’t waste your time with the mass-circulation magazines. The breakthrough campaigns are aimed at the big corporations before they try to reach the individual. You can look at Fortune in any good branch library for nothing.”

  “Where do you get this stuff? I don’t need a typewriter.”

  “Never mind. Just file it away in your mind so you can remember. Another good buy is Christmas cards. February and March are the best months for that. The new lines ain’t out yet and the prices are even lower than in the January clearance sales. Christmas is still fresh in people’s minds in January and though the prices have come down the markup is still terrific. Find out exactly when fruits are in season. The Department of Agriculture puts out a pamphlet. It’s free. Write away for it on a post card. It’s like a timetable. It tells when strawberries are ripe in stores in exactly y
our section of the country. When Temple oranges. Nectarines, grapes. When melons. Everything. The thing is when they’re ripest they’re cheapest. People don’t know that. Everything is supply and demand. And tubes. Use tubes, never aerosol cans. You can squeeze tubes dry, get all the paste or shaving cream out of a tube. With an aerosol can the gas may go flat or the mechanism break, something can always go wrong. Also it’s a lot more expensive to make an aerosol can than a tube. Why pay for the package?”

  “Where do you get all this stuff?”

  “Changing Times, Kiplinger’s Newsletter, Consumer Reports. They’ve paid for themselves I couldn’t tell you how many times over. I figure in the last nine years I’ve saved thirty-seven thousand dollars.”

  “On toothpaste?”

  “I don’t make a move without those books. Also it’s fascinating reading. With me it fills a, I don’t know, need. What other people get from astrology.”

  How account for so much skin? Is something violated here? So much flesh. Preminger sees it through half-shut lids. Their pale meat at odds with their beautiful voices, their bad glands spilling over banks of throat in goiter. He sees humps, coronets of kyphosis, sees mottled, purplish necks given the last of the summer’s sun, sees psoriasis like bubbled, flaking paint, sees flab like broken bones clumsily set by quacks. He shuts his eyes.

  “Zionism. Don’t make me laugh. When they say they made the deserts bloom they mean they got engineers who found a way to build on sand. They mean Levittown, cellars in the Sinai. It’s the same everywhere.”

  “I’m gonna go in. Is it cold?”

  “Just at first. Not after you get used to it.”

  “To hell with it. I need a coronary from icy water?”

  “My sentiments exactly. Want to play cards? A couple hands of gin?”

  “You?”

  “Why not?”

  “You got cards?”

  “Upstairs.”