Pieces of Soap

by Stanley Elkin

  Then he sees the big sign: Rest Area, 2 Miles. Then the other one: Rest Area, 1 Mile. He slows down and gets over on his right to scout if any cars have pulled into the area. He sees one. A couple is eating its lunch at a picnic table. He speeds up momentarily, then brakes abruptly and enters the access road at fifty-three miles an hour, the gravel popping against his car like shrapnel. He gets out on his side and walks around behind the car to the passenger side. The husband smiles and welcomes him vaguely. He smiles back and approaches the picnic table. “Driving so long,” he says, “got to stretch my legs.”

  The husband glances at his out-of-state license. He says, “You can make good time on these interstates, but they sure can hypnotize you. It’s good they have these rest areas.”

  “It is,” he says and he takes his gun out of his pocket and shoots the man in the face. Then he shoots the man’s wife. He has pressed the gun directly into their flesh because he thinks this will muffle the report. The reason he has shot the man first—he’d actually thought this one out and despite the fact that given his druthers he’d have chosen not to kill either of them (he feels some small pleasure in his reasoning)—is that surprise is a terrific advantage and he doesn’t want to give the man too much time to react. He can always take care of the wife, he feels. He’s a male-chauvinist-pig murderer. He steals their lunch—fried chicken, coleslaw, potato salad, Cokes in cans. To tell the truth, he’s on a diet but it’s difficult to watch what you eat when you’re on the road. He starts back to his car. He means to pull the dead woman out of the front seat and leave her there. Then he thinks: Jesus, am I stupid? They could be looking for my car. I’ll take theirs. And that’s what he does.

  Now suppose we do this. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we introduce stream-of-consciousness into our tale, that we finesse, as one erases a tape, whatever minimal body of ideas we had permitted the bank robber in our initial account and substitute other, even nobler ones. Say we give him a memory, say we give him a past. Say at the same time that we do not change a single thing in the chronology of his day. He still grabs the woman, still demands money of the teller, still has trouble pushing his hostage into the car, still gets out of town, still shoots his passenger, still is unhappy with the blood, still sees the sign for the rest area, still has that moment of indecision when he comes to the turnoff and finds that it’s inhabited, still enters the access road, still gets out of his car, still approaches the husband and wife when the man smiles, still initiates the same conversation, still listens to the same reply, still makes his own reply, and still shoots first the husband, then the wife, takes their lunch, and trades in his car for theirs. Instead of each of these events posing problems, however, instead of each action being a specific if not very clever solution to those problems, suppose we just leave them to be events, individually articulated phenomena, as snow falling in Kansas is one phenomenon and a man buying a ticket on the London Underground is another. It’s too late, of course. You’ll have seen that. Getting the money requires taking the hostage. Taking the hostage requires getting rid of the hostage. Getting rid of the hostage requires killing the innocent couple at the picnic area. We have loosed a great universal principle on our story—THAT THERE BE NO WITNESSES. It’s a bloodbath but other people have died for principle before ever our husband and wife did. Still, even if it is too late, I ask you to accept as arbitrary what I’ve already admitted to be a closed circle of inevitable logic. For this I am prepared to fill in lacunae, to plant a new consideration for each one I’ve taken away, like a responsible forester in the state of Maine.

  He walks into the bank and stands in line in front of the third teller’s cage. He glances at the brass nameplate but the name doesn’t register. He thinks, I shall have to write Gloria. Our last communication was not satisfactory. Neither of us is good on the phone. Perhaps it has something to do with the time difference. When it’s nine o’clock here it’s only just six there. Dinnertime. Gloria just back from the office preparing her widow’s supper, opening cans, mashing tuna, slicing in eggs, chips of celery, as one deals a hand of solitaire. Spooning dollops of mayonnaise and vaguely worried about the mercury count. I call, threatening love, boasting love on a full stomach, in my pajamas. “What did you do today?” “Nothing. The usual.” “Is Holmes back?” “Guevada’s plane was grounded in San Diego. He couldn’t get to Honolulu for his address. They wired that they’d put it back to the last day of the conference. Holmes was supposed to fly out after the morning meeting, but he was scheduled to introduce Guevada. I suppose he felt he had to stay over.” “Is it tough for you in the office?” “No.” “You’re irritable.” “I’m tired.” “I love you.” “Yes. That’s fine.” “Have you eaten?” “I’m doing a tuna salad.” “Go out to a restaurant, why don’t you?” “I wouldn’t know what to order. I’d order tuna salad.” Not our ages nor our circumstances—only the time difference. My noon, her morning; my evening, her afternoon; my night, her evening; my dawn, her night. Coming at each other across zones of irreconcilable mood.

  He grabs the pregnant woman for his hostage, pulling her out of line with a rough tug beside him, and wonders what has become of the summer house, if clotted oil like savage footprints march the beach. He thinks of the greasy grains of sand in his bathing trunks, the sun’s and summer’s gravel that he used to pick from his testicles and thighs like a sort of lice, patient at his harvest as a kindly ape. Suddenly he wants seersucker on him like a pediatrician in a small town. He wants his throat mounted in a white collar and a tie like a dagger. He recalls the scent of Lifebuoy soap, the red bar like a portion of rich fish, and shoves the pregnant woman into his automobile. When he shoots her in Ohio he remembers the arcane word for secretary that has been on the tip of his tongue all morning. It is “amanuensis.” Sheila always said she was a private amanuensis to a big corporation lawyer in Albany. Only Sheila said “barrister.” How did it go? “I am private amanuensis to a top-drawer corporation barrister in the capital of the Empire State,” she would explain seriously to people who asked about her. She typed all his business epistles personally, she said. The odd thing was that she was so tall. He understood pretentiousness only in the short. Was this a sort of prejudice? he wondered.

  He sees the second sign: Rest Area, 1 Mile. The brass nameplate, wide and high as a dollar, said “Mrs. Peterssen,” two esses.

  Dauff, back from Europe, was very excited. He had a cause—drip-dry clothing: “They don’t have the facilities for dry cleaning,” he explains. “Oh sure in the big cities they have them, but even there they have to use the old Bellen machines. It’s very expensive. The sons of bitches practically invented sheep but they can’t clean wool. Drip-dry’s the answer. And you save on your overage if you go by plane. The new fibers are very lightweight. The average suitcase—I’m talking about fully packed—weighs fourteen pounds less than it did a dozen years ago. You want to know something else? People don’t appreciate this. They’re in the dark about this. Christ, I ought to be the one to do that Europe on Ten Dollars a Day thing, I know so much about it—What’s the chief disadvantage of the new drip-dry fabrics? Tell me that.”

  The husband bites into a chicken thigh and waves at him.

  “Dauff, what are the broads like?”

  “Never mind the broads. What’s the chief disadvantage of the new Polyesters and synthetics? Are you prepared to tell me?”

  “Driving so long,” he tells the man, “got to stretch my legs.”

  “I give up,” I said.

  “That they don’t hold a crease! That you take ’em out of the dryer you look like you slept in ’em!”

  “You can make good time on these interstates, but they sure can hypnotize you. It’s good they have these rest areas.”

  “Well, there you are,” I told Dauff.

  “Where are you? Where? Here it’s a disadvantage. There it’s an advantage. Do you see how subtle? Do you follow this?” He was so excited he was jumping up and down. At the top of the arc of his jump
he wasn’t quite as tall as Sheila, I noticed.

  “It is,” he tells the husband.

  “Here what’s a disadvantage is an advantage over there. It’s a topsy-turvy world. You always look creased. They don’t know you’re an American. You look like one of them. You get their rates wherever you go!”

  He shoots first the husband, then the wife. He takes their lunch and steals their car. For a moment, in the rearview mirror, slumped over their paper plates, dead at their lunch, the couple look exactly as if they are pronouncing a sort of nearsighted grace. But he isn’t looking. He doesn’t see this. He is thinking of Magda and the big game.

  Something is radically wrong with our plot. There is a touch of the two-headed Russian mutt about it—as though we had transplanted Steve Canyon’s brains onto Popeye’s neck. No. The analogy is off-center, little better than the plot. Discrepancies between body and spirit are not only acceptable in fiction, they are often poignant. What we have in the second version of the plot is a discrepancy between consciousness and situation. What’s been transplanted is one character’s consciousness onto another character’s circumstances, a shuffled memory and will, like Gloria’s widowed afternoon and her caller’s evening, fiction’s mad-scientist effect, fiction’s freak show. The first plot was merely weak, the second fake. What’s wrong with our character in the second plot is not the fact that he’s a bank robber and a coward who uses a pregnant lady for a hostage, not his bad driving, nor the circumstance that he’s murdered three innocent people and stolen two lunches. Nobody’s perfect. No. What’s wrong with him is that he doesn’t pay attention! That he’s careless. I mean that he doesn’t care. That there is a hideous failure of affect between mind and body, circumstance and concern, technique and spirit. That he’s cut loose from time, severed from space, divided inexcusably from his own best interests.

  One could object then, I suppose, that that’s the plot, and to a certain extent the objection is reasonable, for plot, after all, is everywhere. A condition almost of grammar itself, it comes, as it were, with the territory of personality, pronouns, and proper names. Yet we ought, I think, to look to our clichés and take them more seriously. Art imposes order. Everyone knows this. Like a kind of magnet it arranges life’s iron filings into lovely patterns, into superb cat’s cradles of the sweetest geometry. But the essence of these orderings—in fiction at least—is character, and character is not everywhere. It grows in and from choice, from choice’s predispositions and predilections. Various as snowflake, it is never for one individual what it is for another. Only what engines it is the same. Here is character’s oxygen cycle: Vague desire becomes specific desire, specific desire becomes will, will becomes decision, decision action, action consequence. Consequence is either acceptable or unacceptable. If it’s acceptable the chain stops, if unacceptable it begins all over again. But always, peeking over the will’s shoulder—to pick up just one element in the chain—is the character’s brooding, critical, and concerned presence. Plot is simply the unity between what character desires and how it seeks to satisfy those desires. It is a closed community of intention that can be dissolved only by success or resignation. And here’s an elemental ground rule of plot. There may be no good losers in fiction. All characters are essentially sore losers. And even resignation, which occurs with increasing incidence in fiction, is lousy losing. The character would have his life otherwise. That he consents to his fate is an aspersion on his energy, not his values, only the will crying uncle.

  But it’s too narrow a view finally. What happens in so solipsistic an account to surprise, maunderings, meanderings, abrupt turnings and reversals, all plot’s fancy footwork, its slitherings and hairpin squiggles like an ancient river in Texas or bad handwriting in a Slavic tongue?

  Say this. Say plot is a merging of two positions: What I want and what wants me. Obsession on the one hand, resistance on the other—fiction’s Charley Atlasness, its isometric essence. Plot’s soul is double then. What the character wants to happen and what he does not want to happen. Order and process arise from the first principle, and plot’s good fun, its suspense and excitement and surprise, from the second, each hand striving to be uppermost. I don’t just mean conflict though, I mean fleshed conflict. Plot must have its reasons. Indeed, it is its reasons. What Aristotle calls “soul,” I would call bipartisan soul, split theme. Motive must exist on both sides, the character’s and the world’s. Plot would be the sum of these disparate motives.

  It will not do, I think, for the image of the dead couple slumped over their picnic as in prayer to appear momentarily in the rearview mirror of the speeding car seeking its reentry onto the interstate. It will not do, that is, unless the killer sees it first, or his Nemesis does.

  Plot is people. But it is never other people.

  ACTS OF SCHOLARSHIP

  It’s always seemed to me that the act of scholarship has something to do with an abeyant condition of time, like sleep, say, or the opposite of any cliché pressure—all the famous, bloated old formulas of anxiety and danger. Seconds like minutes, minutes like hours, hours hanging on like eternities. Because where does the time go? When we read. When we paint or make music, when we grow in our gardens or work our woods. Say when we pray. Say, I mean, when we forget ourselves and have returned to us—not grinding our teeth or playing with our hair, not biting our nails or worrying flesh like a doodle—a state of grace; our hearts, I mean, on hold, the participatory oblivion of one’s engaged attentions as solid and efficient as meshed gears.

  Pure—forget tenure, the pressure to publish—axless virtue I mean. Old advertent, meticulous heed; all old Magic Marker’d focus. Man learning, concentrate and contemplative as a babe. The act of scholarship, the calling of books. I’m a Ph.D. myself (University of Illinois, 1961; “Religious Symbolism in the Novels of William Faulkner”), but sometimes I think there are no subjects, that the humanities exist only in the imagination of the humanist, that there is no history, only historians, no painting, only painters, no philosophy, only philosophers. Perhaps there is not even mathematics, only mathematicians, no physics, only physicists, no economics, only money, no medicine, only cancer. Only what kills us, you see, only what we have in the bank or see from our room, the light we read by but not the electricity. The world is an abstraction for most of us. We are so ignorant. I am.

  What I’m driving at, of course, is an idea of immensity, looking for a way to convey my sense—I suspect everyone’s sense—of our astonished solipsism, that frightful moment when we look up and discover that we are flying solo in the universe. There’s too much, too much to know, too much planet, too much everything like so many bumper crops of the possible. (The world has more news than is fit to print and backs up on our lawn and in our lives like so many papers we’ll never get to.)

  And this—the unknowableness of the world—it seems to me, is what scholars know, why they cut the universe up into little pieces and take small bites.

  First of all, we have to distinguish between the scholar doing research and the scholar loose in the world, between books, articles, monographs; teaching his classes; gone fishing.

  So then. A scholar in the carrel—this is my memory talking, the gone old days in my own carrel—is one sort of fellow. As innocent of venality as someone who’s just made love is of lust. What a sweetheart the scholar on the job in pursuit of his subject. What a pussycat and honeybunch. What a jolly good fellow, what an eye apple, what a peach. What cream in what coffee! On time’s smooth roll, as forgetful of himself as your kid asleep, the fact of raptness on him like a vision in the cross hairs of a saint. Like your kid asleep, indeed. Yes. Never so manly as at work, never less the preener, coxcomb, fop. Never, that is, less the so-and-so or S.O.B. His audience? It might as well be lint, flowers, stone, the teeth in combs. Animal, vegetable, or mineral, or the black holes in the sky. His audience the page he writes on, the number-two pencil she uses. And probably never so happy. No, never. Happier than when giving to charity or doing good deeds
. Happier, for that matter, than when being praised. (Being praised is moving; it gives you goose bumps, lumps your throat, and wets your eyes, but it can’t make you happy, not in the tall, astronaut-heightened, empyrean ways.) Homework. Life as homework!

  Which brings us to the scholar’s other state—the scholar not studying. Caught in some bear trap of ego, some Sing Sing of self, doing time in his personality, solitary confined in his character. Look at him, miles beyond the twelve-mile limit of his ordinary range. In some town off the turnpike, say, in a library in some community college seeking guarantees of his existence in the card catalogue, the day made or broken depending upon whether his books are among the holdings. But not enough merely to be included; actually taking the call number down in his head, bouncing it silently on the tongue, so that he looks like a nibbler or a reader of lips who moves his lips when he reads. See him, patrolling the stacks, sidling the shelves, this guerrilla of culture, some sharpshooter’s instinct for the spine of his book, coming up on it like an Indian, appraising the condition of its spine like a Dutchman a diamond, knowing without even removing the book from the shelf the number of times it’s been taken out, or how long it’s been allowed to stand like milk in the sunshine, whether it’s spoiled, whether it’s turned, knowing but having to see anyway, sliding the book out, opening it from the back, from the right, in some orthodoxy of obsession, noting on the card in the envelope pasted on the inside of the rear board how many times it’s circulated, doing this absurd bookkeeping, a bookkeeper, a balancer of his own book, and wondering if his odometer will be turned back, if he’ll ever be rebound.