Searches & Seizures (42 page)

“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 understand 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.

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.)