Boswell

I

The truth is we haven’t caught on. We are so lonely. Margaret asks, Are we happy, and the question makes me furious and sad. I put her off with a joke. I read our bank balance. I point to the carpet and indicate its thickness with my forefinger and thumb. I bring her to the kitchen and show her our meats.

I tell Margaret that she is my war bride. The fact is she seemed actually to diminish when we went through customs. The man asked if we had anything to declare and Margaret stared at him as if she didn’t understand the question. When he asked again she looked at me and I thought she would cry.

“No, nothing,” I said. “We have nothing to declare.” You know how it is when you make a mistake.

I can’t explain it. We are out of touch. Not with each other, but mutually, with everything.

Hawthorne tells a story about a man named Wakefield who left his home one evening and didn’t return for twenty years. His act was a whim, unpremeditated, but it made no difference; if he had come back a week later it would already have been too late. One must never break the rhythm of his life. You stay in lockstep or you suffer. Every vacation is an upheaval. I have seen men at the seashore whose free time is the most grotesque of burdens. They are haunted by the idea of things going on without them, of someone at the office doing their job, opening their mail, answering their phone. It’s an intimation of death. You have to make a life, however grab-bag or eccentric; there has to be routine, pattern. I’ve failed there. Something about my life gives my life away, something improvised and sad. At my dinner parties there are mismatched dishes, chairs, plastic spoons. I was better off alone, I think. There was desperation to keep me going. It’s all what you’re used to. For me running scared is the only way to travel. Poor is what I know best, and there are times when I can almost taste the old degradation of the bones — ten minutes for a rest stop, pee, spit, and regret, talking to the driver beside the big open underbelly of the bus where the cardboard suitcase goes, the box tied up with string.

I’ll tell you what’s wrong with me. I don’t know what to tip. A grown man!

There are “executive flights” now and I am on them and there is always monogrammed linen and the best booze in my attaché case, but the truth is I was never less attaché. I have heard the stewardesses singing each to each, I do not think that they will sing to me.

Well, the grass is never greener, I always say. The course of true life never did run smooth.

When as a child I was home ill everything was fine until the others came back and I heard their voices and laughter outside. Then something would happen inside me, in my heart, and I’d have to get up and shut the window. To this day the most awful sound for me is a conversation overheard, people talking to each other in a restaurant at the next table, behind me on a bus. I swear, sometimes I feel already like a ghost.

For me envy isn’t a sin, it seems, but a fact. I need it to live, like air. Sometimes I think, If I’d lived more to the purpose… Crap! Who has lived more to the purpose than myself? No; disappointment, like rotten fruit, is always the last thing left in the larder. Things pall. The world’s appalling. A’palling. It goes like a song.

Each day the conviction grows. I’m going to die. I’m going to die. I’ll tell you how far it’s gone: I’ve stopped smoking; there are seatbelts in my automobiles; I will not have phosphorescent dials on my clocks; I watch my cholesterol; I am wary of air-conditioning. All that can be done I do. It means nothing. Nothing.

For a year we lived like tourists in our own city. We went to all the shows, the movies, the museums, the public buildings. Three times we went on the boat around Manhattan island, five times to the top of the Empire State Building. For a sense of belonging we took out library cards. We joined the clubs that send you merchandise or books. Making our fastidious choices provided us with the illusion of will. Margaret learned to cook. I learned nothing.

I sent money to my son’s grandmother, enclosing with the checks long letters. I wanted my boy, I said, and outlined the advantages I could bestow upon him now. When she opposed my plans I was glad, for that allowed me to continue to compose the letters. Like the book clubs, these gave me the illusion of somehow shaping a domesticity. Something ritualistic had been absent from my life always, I recognized, was absent still. I made a conscious effort to live as others lived, but I noticed that whenever I did the things other people did, I felt strangely incognito — as if, like all orphans, I was ultimately at home only in the homes of others. It cannot be good for me to have an address, my own phone number. I have been too long bizarre. Domestic dibbuks have claimed me. Ah, I think, reality flattens everything, despite its being good for us. (One must come to grips, they say. If they mean I must embrace pain, that’s redundant. What the hell isn’t reality; who doesn’t face up to it?)

I had my ruses; they were legion. Sometimes I read the obituaries in newspapers for the opportunity they gave me of further rituals. In my files there is an example. From the Times of October 19, 1960:

ELWORTHAM. On October 18, 1960, peacefully, in his sleep, at his home, 143 Bell Avenue, Brooklyn, Edward J. Elwortham, aged 59. Beloved husband of Frances, dear father of Robert. Funeral service 11:30 A.M., Friday, October 20, 1960. Phizer’s Chapel, 71 Avenue C, Brooklyn, N.Y. No flowers.

The feeling with which I wrote Mrs. Elwortham was not faked. It was almost as though I had indeed known him as I said. I even signed my name.

I wrote:

Dear Mrs. Elwortham,

Words cannot express the deep sense of shock I experienced when I read Thursday of Edward’s death. We haven’t met, Mrs. Elwortham. Of recent years Edward and I had drifted apart, as even best friends do, and we saw each other only infrequently, but Edward was a friend of my youth, and I have thought of him often over the years. No words of mine can ease the grief I know you must be experiencing now. Edward was a good man. His absence will be keenly felt by all who knew him. I can only pray that time, that old healer, will do its job to assuage your and Robert’s pain.

I notice that the paper mentions the family’s desire to omit flowers. I do not know what Edward’s favorite charity was, Mrs. Elwortham, but perhaps it would be all right if I made a contribution in Edward’s name to the Red Cross. In the meanwhile if there is anything I can do, please don’t hesitate to call on me. With all sympathy, I am…

Writing the check to the Red Cross and entering the figure on the stub was enormously satisfying to me. That’s the sort of thing I mean. Once I wrote a letter to the president of General Electric complaining about a refrigerator. I told him it wouldn’t make ice cubes and that butter melted in the tray.

Although these masquerades calmed me I saw that to continue with them would make me sick.

Late in that first year of our marriage, my son’s grandmother died. I talked my decision over with Margaret, though this was simply a courtesy. I am not one of your typical rich women’s husbands, always sneaking around the comers of his intentions. We have an understanding, Margaret and I, which is that under no circumstances am I ever to feel obligation. I consider taking things for granted part of the marriage agreement, a piece of the dowry. So a year after we were married, when I was thirty-three and he was eighteen, I sent for my son.

Whatever else may be wrong with me I am essentially a civilized man, and as such I enjoy my little scene now and then. I arranged this one with all the old style. I wired the boy a ticket on an executive flight. I sent him money and the address of the best tailor in St. Louis. A car met him at the airport. For the occasion I wore a smoking jacket for the first time in my life. “Boswell, you’re crazy,” Margaret said.

“How is that, my dear? As yet no real link has been established between smoking jackets and cancer.”

I also wore an ascot, flannel trousers, black silk hose and carpet slippers. I made Margaret put on a green taffeta dressing gown. The rustle was deafening, but we looked wonderful.

When the boy arrived I shook his hand and offered to make him a drink. “How are you, David?” I said. “Margaret, this is my son David.”

Margaret shook David’s hand. She has a strong, horsewoman’s handshake which would be advantageous to me in my business, if I had a business.

I stepped brightly to the bar whistling Noel Coward, and mixed drinks for us all. “Water, David? Soda?”

“That’s all right,” David said. “Whichever is easier.”

“Well, neither is terribly difficult, David.”

“Well, whichever is easier,” David said politely.

The problem had never occurred to me. “I think water is easier,” I said from behind the bar. “All you do is turn the tap.”

“Water is fine, thank you. I don’t want to put you to any trouble,” David said.

I wondered if my boy was capable of irony and watched him as I mixed the drinks.

I brought the drinks out with a flourish and stepped between Margaret and my son. I put my arms around their shoulders. “My big family,” I said expansively, looking from one to the other.

David smiled and raised his glass to his lips. It was the first time I had ever seen anyone swallow while smiling. Of course he was uneasy but I began to see that my son was one of those people who were constantly apologizing for their presence, treating themselves like an untidy bedroom through which a housewife reluctantly shows a guest to the toilet. Standing there before me, he seemed to be attempting to hide. There was something maidenly about him, as though he might be trying to cover his privates. David, I saw sadly, was not an ironist but a jerk. It was all my big family needed. I mean, it’s all well and good to play Noel Coward, and considered in one kind of light a sophisticated father and a dopey son have certain comic possibilities, but the fact is David was a disappointment. I had been hoping — illogically perhaps, considering my past treatment of him — for a different type, someone’s roommate at a good prep school, with trees in his past and summer places and a few years in a classy hotel off Central Park, a deep-chested lad who had been to Europe and spoke French and could get down a mountain on a pair of skis and didn’t smile when he swallowed. But the truth was David was scared stiff and looked a little Jewish.

“The trip was—” “Well, David, how was—”

“I’m sorry,” David said.

“No, no, go ahead.”

“No, please. You,” David said.

“Well, how was the trip?”

“The trip was very interesting,” David said.

“I see.”

“It was very interesting,” he said again, tentatively forceful.

I wondered what was so interesting about it. Probably the little paper sack, or the funny cellophane packages of butter and silverware, or the brochures, or the instructions for ditching at sea.

“They let you read magazines,” he said. “Fortune, U.S. News and World Report, everything. I don’t often get a chance to see those books.”

Why did things always turn out this way? There was something careless about people’s lives, something spontaneous in existence which spoiled it.

I had prepared a speech to make to David. It would have been a silly speech under the circumstances; now it was ridiculous. He wouldn’t know that, I thought, but Margaret would. I decided to give it anyway. Like most people it is impossible for me to change my plans. We are able to forgive and forget the past, able even to ignore the future, but let him beware who treads on our present.

“Now look here, David,” I began and immediately saw my mistake. Thinking I was about to reprimand him, David had jumped back. He looked guiltily down at the carpet, perhaps to see whether he had spilled any of his drink.

“No, no,” I said. “Look, David. I mean, listen, David, why don’t you sit down and relax?”

“It’s all right,” he said, “I can stand. I like to stand.”

“No, sit down,” I said.

“Well, I don’t want to make any trouble for you,” he said.

“Well, it’s not making any trouble for us if you sit down,” I said.

“If you’re sure it’s all right?” he said.

“Margaret, it’s all right if David sits down, isn’t it?”

“Just this once,” Margaret said.

David, who was wearing a sort of a grayish suit, chose a sort of grayish chair. He had a habit of putting his hands out of sight, like a nun. Once he was invisible I began again.

“What I want to say, David, is by way of apology and explanation.” At the word “apology” David moved his lips to make one. I rushed on, feeling lost and more sad in the presence of the real David than ever I had in dealing with the harmed, sensitive, prep school David of my imagination. “There’s too much talk about fathers and sons,” I said. “David, I don’t understand other people very well. The integrity of someone else’s identity is a mystery to me. I’m astonished by other people’s lives, David. For me, every human being is somehow like a man under arms, a good soldier. He seems so sure of his cause that I wonder if it ever occurs to him that he might have to die for it. What I respect in other people, I suppose, is their capacity for victory, their confidence that it will come. I know I wouldn’t want to go up against most of them. You’ve seen men. You’ve seen them coming at you down the sidewalk, taking up your space. You know what they’re like. There’s a lot of nonsense talked about human beings. If you believe it you might think the least little thing is capable of breaking people down. My God, David, that can’t be true. Do you think those guys on the executive flight are made of glass? Yet one hears every day of lives ruined by unhappy childhoods, broken homes, nervousness about the bomb, bad marriages, unrequited love. Those things are nothing, David.

“You probably feel you’ve been mistreated by me, denied a birthright. You—”

“No,” David protested. “It’s all right. I don’t mind.”

“Jesus,” Margaret said, “the man abandoned you, sonny.”

“I didn’t abandon David, Margaret.”

Margaret laughed.

“I didn’t,” I said again.

“It’s all right,” David said. “I don’t—”

“You don’t mind, I know,” I said angrily. “Look, maybe all I’m saying is that men can take care of themselves. Certainly that’s what I did. The thing is to forget grief, David. If I’ve harmed you by not providing you with myself, then I’m sorry, but you’re mistaken to be harmed.”

“I see,” David said.

“We want you to live with us. I’ve talked this over with Margaret and she agrees,” I said. “You wouldn’t be putting us to any trouble,” I added hastily. Suddenly I foresaw all the objections he would raise, the soft demurs and small effacements that would have to be answered one by one, point by point, until it was obvious to anyone that David did in fact put people to trouble. He surprised me, however.

“I don’t think I could come until June,” he said.

“Why?”

“I’m supposed to be in school until then,” he said apologetically.

I began to see that my son had the beggar’s trick of spurious withdrawal so that all you finally saw was the hand. His very grammar was deceptively soft. He didn’t think he could come, he was supposed to be in school, as though the world were always arranging itself independently of his will. There was toughness in his style too, I saw, and if I didn’t approve of his methods I did begin to like him a little more. It has always been reassuring to me to have it confirmed that others are as selfish as myself.

“Well, if you can’t come till June you can’t come till June,” I said. “The fact is, David, that your grandmother was never very committal with us where you were concerned. I didn’t even know you were going to school.”

“I go to hairdresser’s school,” David said very softly.

“Hairdresser’s school? You’re a beautician?”

“Yes, sir,” David said sadly. For a moment he allowed us to see his hands.

“Is that what you want?”

“In high school the placement counselor thought it might be something I would be able to do.”

“Cut that out,” I said impatiently.

I saw him grin briefly despite himself. “It might be better if I stayed just where I am,” he said.

“Why?”

“You might change your mind about me. Then where would I be?”

“We could give you a check right now,” I said. “That would protect you.”

“I don’t think I’d better,” David said.

“Suit yourself.”

“My teachers think I ought to come to New York after I graduate.”

“Don’t you ever say you want anything?”

“I’m sorry,” David said. He shifted slightly in his seat, somehow giving the impression that his back was to us.

“David,” I said. “You won’t be any trouble to us, and if your business forces you to be in New York I see no reason why you shouldn’t stay with us. As you see, there’s plenty of room here. I have a great deal to make up to you for, of course, so I would consider it a favor to me if you would stay with us and allow me to force certain advantages on you that I am now in a better position to give.”

“That’s very nice of you both,” David said slyly. “If you’re absolutely sure I won’t be in the way.”

“Of course not,” I said. “Will he, Margaret?”

Margaret laughed.

Then I made a test. I said something under my breath so that David couldn’t quite hear it.

“I beg your pardon?” David said.

“Don’t you ever just say ‘what,’ David?” I asked.

II

Despite what I may have told David about there being too much talk of fathers and sons, I find that in one respect I was mistaken. Relationship — blood — is a peculiar business. I don’t care how close a friendship is, you can always pull back at the last moment. There’s the possibility of betrayal. The same thing in a family is a higher treason. Somehow one is closer to a first cousin than he is to a wife, for it isn’t merely an alliance of choice, of the will. I’ve spoken to Morty about this and he says I’ve stumbled on an anthropological truth. He points out that all tribes, no matter how primitive, have ceremonies of divorce, but that no ceremony exists anywhere for the undoing of a relationship between kinsmen. My first cousin is my first cousin, no matter how much we may come to hate each other. It’s nature, a fact the way a stone is a fact. How much more interesting, then, is the bond between a father and a son. I never imagined it. I wouldn’t look at him twice in the street perhaps, but he is my son and that makes the difference.

Because David is mine I try to change him. I come into a room where he is deferentially dematerialized against a wall (his old habit of blending with furniture of any style is still unbroken; indeed, I suspect he deliberately dresses for rooms he knows he will inhabit), and I call in a loud voice, “David, where are you, son?” It embarrasses him to be flushed out this way, but he does not yield: next time it is the same. The boy’s will is like iron.

Margaret is left out of this; she understands that David is not her son. We have been trying to have children together. She wants them badly, but mine is the more urgent need. I must have them! We are neither of us ardent but we have used no devices since David came to live with us. We make love with an extraordinary frequency and there is a sense of emergency about our throes. In a way that I do not understand, I see that if I have a destiny at all it is to be a father. It’s not that I am putting aside for that rainy day when there will be no more Boswells. I am not concerned with perpetuating my name; that kind of immortality has nothing to do with me. But were I a king whose succession depended upon getting sons I could not be more concerned. (I perceive that as I grow older I become more obsessive rather than less. If one day this leads me into a park where I will sit, my fingers inside my corrupt overcoat fondling my erection, waiting for the lunchtime passage of one particular small schoolgirl, that’s just too bad. There are only two kinds of intelligences, the obsessive and the perspectual. All dirty old men come from the former and all happy men from the latter, but I wouldn’t trade places. In this life frustration is the Promethean symbol of effort.) Fatherhood, I think, fatherhood! I lust for sons and daughters, but nothing happens. The more I pump Margaret the less good it seems to do. I asked her if there was something wrong.

“Wrong, what do you mean wrong?”

“In the old days in Italy, did you ever have an abortion?”

She was very angry and for several days wouldn’t allow me in her bed. My God, how those days were torture. I had never felt so strong, my seed so ripe, never experienced greater impatience, the sense of time so uselessly destroyed. I realized that I could not risk offending her that way again and I became conciliatory, fatuous in the pains I took with her. Yet the question, which I had not meant to ask, had implications. I had never really minded Margaret’s promiscuity, nor had I any reason to suspect that after we were married she was unfaithful. Before David came I might have forgiven an infidelity with a wave of the hand, but now I had a horror of raising another man’s son. After I had apologized, I immediately re-risked everything by telling Margaret that if I ever discovered she had gone to bed with another man I would kill them both.

I made her go to a gynecologist. She had all the tests. Her womb was not tipped, her tubes not stopped. She produced eggs like a million hens. “Then why aren’t you pregnant?” I demanded.

She shrugged. “The doctor says I can have children,” she said. “He thinks you ought to be examined.”

“Did you explain that I have already proved myself?”

But of course I went. I made an appointment with a Dr. Green, whom the Doctor’s Exchange listed as a specialist in these things.

“Your wife has been examined, I assume,” the doctor said.

“Yes. She’s all right.” I was looking at the certificate on the wall, from a medical school I had never heard of. Why did it have to be a school I never heard of?

“Yes, the husband’s always the last partner to be examined. That’s masculine vanity for you, isn’t it? And I suppose you thought it out of the question that a strapping fellow like yourself could be the sterile one.”

“That’s what I’m here to find out.”

“Well, let’s go down to it then, shall we? We’re not here for recriminations or to fix blame, but out of scientific interest, am I right? Now I don’t know what I’m going to find in your case, but I don’t want you to worry. If we should discover that you’re infertile there may be some things we can do to build you up. If that fails there’s the possibility of adoption, isn’t there? So don’t look so nervous. As it happens, I handle a lot of adoptions and you don’t even have to wait as you would if you worked through an agency. It’s all legal, brother. I don’t want to hear any uninformed talk about a black market. It’s expensive, I won’t crap you, but how are you going to fix a price on human life, do you see? I mean it ought to be expensive.”

“I’m not interested in adopting children.”

“Now look here, son, I can see what you’re thinking. I’m way ahead of you in that respect. You’re thinking, ‘Why, he’s a quack.’”

“Something like that.”

“Sure you are. Well, it’s not true. I’ll tell you the truth — there’s a lot of prejudice in this business. Very few men are as honest as you evidently are and will even come in for an examination like this. The adoptions? That’s something I do just to keep my experimental work going. Because you see I haven’t put all my cards on the table for you. How’d you get my name?”

“Through the Doctor’s Exchange.”

“That’s what I thought. That’s just what I thought. Well, I’ll take care of you. Nobody could do it better. But do you know what we do here? It’s a fertility clinic. This is a donor station. I’m talking about artificial insemination. I only accept the very highest type of donor: intellectual, slightly left-wing Jewish medical students. How’d you like a son by one of those fellers? A very popular number right now. Well, we get them all. Artists from the Village, writers. All very good-looking as well as smart. It’s the surest way I know of to raise a family. Takes all the risk right out. It’s the genes — the genes are everything. Some of my patients come back two, three, four times. You’d be astonished to learn just how many of Dr. Green’s kids are the leaders of their communities today.”

“Are you a donor?”

“No. Oh God, no. In the early days when it was slow I won’t say I didn’t try to cut expenses by putting something in the bottle now and then, but that’s water under the bridge. Well, images change. Taste changes. This I promise, my young doctors are the highest example of the current image. To get on my list they take vows of celibacy. That keeps the stock up, you see. It’s a kind of quality control.”

“But let’s suppose, for argument’s sake, you don’t like the current image. Well then, pick any type you do like. If you don’t see what you want, just ask for it. If I haven’t got him now I know where I can get him. This I promise — the biggest depth in the City of New York. What do you want? An actor? A politician? I’ve even got scions of famous families who have to be specially solicited. Now for obvious reasons the donors have to remain anonymous, but if you want I could show you my library. It’s a file, you see, with the biography of the donor. What the father did, the mother, personality traits, IQ’s, medical histories — the works. You’d be surprised at the famous men represented in that library. They’re not all active donors now, of course, but when they were young they might have needed a little extra dough. You could get men just like them today. Every type, any type.

“Now this is all probably very premature. I’m not saying you’re going to need these services. I don’t know what I’ll find until I look through that microscope, but I just want you to keep it in mind if the news turns out to be bad. And this I promise, it’s perfectly painless. As a matter of fact, I’ll tell you the truth, many women enjoy it. Just a little injection into your wife and that’s all there is to it. We even mix a little of your own stuff in with it so you can’t ever be completely sure the kid isn’t actually yours — well, he is yours, of course, but you know what I mean. Incidentally, that’s a new wrinkle. The profits from some of those adoptions you scorn paid for that. Very tricky scientific problem to work out. To develop the seminal host so that the donor’s and the husband’s sperm can live together without eating each other up. What a contribution to the field that’s been, I don’t mind telling you! What solace it’s provided even prouder men than yourself! And no charge until conception. I don’t care how many injections it takes.”

“It’s not what I had in mind.”

“All right. All right. I’m not trying to sell it to you. I’m just telling you what the alternatives are in case the news isn’t what either of us wants to hear. That’s okay, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“All right,” Dr. Green said. “Let’s see it.”

At first I didn’t understand. Then I showed him.

He looked at it thoughtfully. “May I?” He said.

“Of course.”

He held my penis in his palm for a moment and then flipped it casually to the other hand. “Not bad,” he said at last. “Nothing mechanically wrong anyway but you can’t judge a book by its cover. I’ll need a specimen. Now you’ve got a choice here. I can exercise the prostate and I can get enough that way to tell all we need to know, but it’s painful and frequently embarrassing to many men. The other thing is you can go into the lab — the same one the donors use — and bring something back in this bottle.”

“The lab,” I said.

“Through there,” said Dr. Green. He pointed to a doorway hung with a curtain, vaguely like the fitting room in a cheap department store.

“Turn on the light,” Dr. Green called. “There’s a switch on your left.”

“It can be done in the dark,” I said.

“You’re my patient,” Dr. Green said, “your vanity means nothing to me. The cure’s the thing.”

Oh, go away, I thought.

The doctor must have read my thoughts, for in a moment I could hear him padding about the office, opening drawers, tapping his pockets, like one making preparations to go out. “I need some cigarettes,” he announced. “I’ll just go down and get them. I’ll lock you in so you won’t be disturbed. Okay?”

“Okay,” I muttered.

“Okay?”

“Yes, yes. Fine.”

“Take your time. Turn on the light.” I heard him close the office door and lock it.

It was impossible; I felt ridiculous. For a moment I thought of escaping, but then it occurred to me that what was happening to me was a rare thing indeed. Masturbating for science. In a lab, for God’s sake. Sanctioned by society! Juvenile fantasies in a good cause! I thought, Why waste it? Still, I had never been less stirred. I removed my pants and underwear. Despite my sense of freedom I felt foolish and a little cold. For five minutes I stood there, idly manipulating myself, distracted. It occurred to me that the practical difficulties were insurmountable. Then I realized what it was: it was the bottle; I had to put the bottle down. I decided to turn on the lights so that I could find it easily when I needed it.

What I saw when I had switched on the light took away my breath. What Dr. Green had called a lab was really a kind of closet. Around the three walls were unevenly spaced shelves, on each of which had been placed some object obviously meant by Dr. Green to inspire lust. There were those tiny models of women one sees in those drug stores where they sell trusses. The women, otherwise naked, were intricately and suggestively taped, their bandages oddly emphasizing their nakedness. There were rubbery, life-sized breasts removed from some medical school lecture room, the nipples spread and torn by cancer. There were posture charts ripped from old textbooks, the girls in profile, anonymous, one square- shouldered, straight-assed, the next round-shouldered, the pelvis somehow fallen, the behind dragging sluggishly. There was a 1944 wall calendar from a garage in Pittsburgh. There was a model of a plastic, transparent woman, the organs like tainted meat inside her, vaguely suggesting one of those heavy globes portraying some cozy winter scene. I had the impression that if I turned it upside down and shook it, her insides would glow with impossibly slow-falling snow. Everywhere there were plaster of Paris breasts, torsos, behinds, vaginas like halved fruit. In one corner of the closet was a bald life-size department store manikin, completely nude. She had movable arms and legs and these had been arranged in an obscene pose by Dr. Green or one of the donors. The profits from some of those adoptions I scorn paid for this, I thought.

I thought, Oh God, I’m getting out of here, but I made no effort to move. I told myself that it was my fascination with the act of fatherhood that kept me there, but against my will, or rather without it, I began slowly to respond. Quickly my fantasies began to multiply, proliferating wildly so that it was impossible to concentrate on any one of them. One after another, insane images leaped into my head. It was like being on a magic-carpet ride or on one of those subterranean tours of the world. Suddenly my hands were everywhere, touching, fondling, torturing. I put my palms over the rubber breasts and squeezed, the hard doll cancer-ridden nipples pressing unpleasantly into my flesh. I nuzzled my head between the manikin’s breasts; I arranged her hands caressingly and rubbed against them. Just before the orgasm I leaned back heavily against a shelf. The uneven wooden edge put a splinter into my back, but I nearly swooned. I forgot the bottle and only at the last moment managed clumsily to catch the dregs. Sperm was everywhere. Weakened, I knelt to scoop it into the bottle with my cupped palm.

Suddenly Dr. Green pulled back the curtains.

“Forget it, dear boy,” he said. “The woman cleans it up.”

“I thought you were out getting cigarettes.”

“Cigarettes cause cancer. I’m a medical man. I don’t smoke.” He smiled. “That’s mine, I think,” he said, taking the bottle from my hand. “I don’t mean to rush you, but I have to make the test while the stuff’s fresh. You’d be surprised how quickly it dies in the open air.” He took the bottle to a microscope and poured a little onto a slide. The outside of the bottle was smeared with sperm and a little got on Dr. Green’s fingers. I stared at them. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m used to it. Go get dressed. This won’t take long.” I had forgotten that I was still naked.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Don’t worry about it. You’re a very vigorous man.”

In the closet I pulled the curtain and put on my clothes quickly, averting my eyes from Dr. Green’s collection. When I came out the doctor was sitting behind his desk. For the first time since I had seen him he inspired a kind of confidence. That he achieved this at the expense of my own barely occurred to me.

“Well,” he said expansively, “the count’s a little low — what I call ’the lower limits of normal.’ But you’re not sterile.”

“What’s wrong, then?”

“Well, your sperm count is only seven million per square inch, plus there’s too high a proportion of long- tails and short-tails.”

“Seven million sounds like a lot to me.”

“You laymen give me a laugh,” he said. “Of course it only takes one to make a life. It only takes one.”

“Then it’s all right.”

“Well, it’s a tricky problem,” he said. “We don’t understand it. Somehow the more a man has going for him the better his chances are. You hear seven million and you think you could be the father of your country, but that’s not the way it works. The average man has about sixty million per square inch, did you know that?”

I shook my head.

“The goddamn sperm are incompetent. They don’t know what the hell they’re doing. They’ll swim backwards, get lost, drown, anything to keep from getting the job done.” He frowned. “Oh, it’s a tragic thing when a couple wants children and can’t have them.”

“But you said I wasn’t sterile.”

“Well, technically you’re not. You’re not. But it’s going to be harder for you. Listen. There’s a terrific emotional thing here too that goes on. Don’t leave that out. Your count is low to begin with and you get anxious about conception and that doesn’t help anything. When you make love you got to put all that out of your mind. It’s like what they say about rape. You’ve just got to lie back and enjoy it.”

“Crap,” I said.

“Look, you want some advice? Listen to me. The thing for you is to adopt a kid. Once you do that the edge’ll be off. You’d be surprised how often one of my couples conceives after they’ve adopted. People who’ve been childless twenty years.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” I said. “The fact is that when I was fifteen years old, on my first try, on my first try, I made a girl pregnant.”

Dr. Green looked dubious.

“I did,” I said.

“Who?”

“What does it matter? A girl.”

“Your girlfriend? A virgin?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know.”

“There, you see?” the doctor said.

“Do I see what?”

“Well, sonny, you may have been taken for a ride, that’s all. Did you marry the girl?”

“No.”

“Good for you. Good for you. Sure, that’s what it was, you were taken for a ride. Oh, sure, the sperm count could go down over the years, but it’s an unlikely thing. The first time out? Seven million? Such a high proportion of short-tails and long-tails? It’s hardly likely, and that’s my professional opinion.”

“What do I owe you?”

“Hey, are you sore?”

“What do I owe you?”

“Come on, don’t get sore.”

“What do I owe you?”

“You are sore.”

“He lives with me,” I said.

“Oh,” the doctor said.

“He’s my son.”

“Well, he probably is. It could happen. Sure he is. Certainly.” -

“He’s my son!”

“I’m certain of it,” the doctor said. “The father would know a thing like that.”

“What do I owe you?”

“Fifty dollars,” Dr. Green said.

I put the money on the desk and got up to go. When I walked out of his office Dr. Green followed me. “Listen,” he said, “the next time you make love to your wife, relax.” I pressed the button for the elevator. “Your sperm are a little sluggish. Copulate only once a week. Have her use a pillow under her ass — it makes for a better angle. Make sure the room is warm but not overheated. Cut out fatty foods. Meat is very important.”

I started to walk down the stairs. The doctor stood at the top and called after me. “Try wheat germ. Get in shape. Don’t be anxious.”

“He’s my son,” I repeated to myself. “My son.”

I didn’t want to go home; I didn’t want to see David until I had figured it all out. I went to a bar, and as I drank I thought about Dr. Green. I was a little surprised that I wasn’t really angry. He’s my son, I thought. I began to giggle. Seven million, I thought. Father of my country. I laughed. Short-tails, I thought. Long-tails. I told the barman to leave the bottle. Only one will get through, men, but I’m asking for seven million volunteers. Who swims? Not you, short-tail. Not you, long-tail. I went into the men’s room to pee. You worthless prick, I thought. I went back to my stool at the bar. We’re dead a long time, I thought. How rare a thing it is to be alive, I thought. I told the barman about it. He shrugged. “You laymen give me a laugh,” I said. But really, I thought, how rare a thing it is to be alive, how really rare. It was almost clever of us to manage it. Everything was against it: a hostile solar system, booby sperm, short-tails, long-tails, fatty foods, the wrong angle, cold rooms, overheated rooms. Finally, ultimately, death itself was against it. I felt liberated, almost gay. It wasn’t unlike that sensation one has of self-congratualation at the death of a friend. What did it matter not to have sons? “All the better to hoard one’s life, my dear.”

I went home improved, buoyed by an unfamiliar illusion of well-being. Margaret assumed I had been given a clean bill of health by the doctor, and I didn’t tell her otherwise. But it didn’t last, of course; these visions never do. Moments of truth are only moments of truth.

A week later I made love to Margaret as in a dream. We were alone in the house and I practically seduced her. I played the phonograph and used strategic lighting; I offered her cocktails; I rubbed her neck and read poetry. I felt myself softened, like one who has just stepped out of a warm bath. I was incredibly gentle. We might have been nymphs, shepherd and shepherdess. I spoke to her in promises, in the language of vows. In bed, I fitted a pillow tenderly beneath her, preparing her as slaves prepare a bath the caliph will enter. Then at the last minute I shouted to the escaping sperm, “Now, conceive. Damn you, conceive!”

III

For a time at least I was like anybody else. I had become someone to whom several things could happen at once. It was a shock to realize that the willingness to live complexly — doubly, trebly — to throw open one’s windows to all weathers, was the ordinary experience of most men.

Yielding to one human ritual is yielding to all. It is like being a sharecropper come North. We fanatics are simple men, unused to toilets, traffic. I had slums in me. Behind my life now, in its nooks and crannies and unseen corners, was a texture of domesticity, thick as atmosphere, as complexly there as government — its highways, national parks, armies — implicit in a postage stamp.

One night — we had made the book club selections for August; had decided not to take a phonograph recording that month; had chosen an alternate musical for Show-of-the-Month — I suddenly noticed that Margaret spoke with an accent. It was odd that I had never heard it before, and then I realized, Why of course, it’s new—as if in marrying me she had disfigured herself, had actually canted her tongue or ruined her mouth so that the sounds came out off-center, muffled, and with some eccentric emphasis. It suddenly struck me that Margaret was lonely — not lonely as we were both lonely together, playing our meaningless house by choosing books, recordings, restaurants and plays as others might figure a budget or decide what model car to buy, but lonely in a way that had nothing to do with me. It was frightening to be suddenly confronted with the tight, closed system of another human being; it was like watching someone asleep, mysterious, seductive as a frontier.

I began to wonder why Margaret had married me. Obliged, once I recognized her condition, to respond to it, I responded with anger.

“You don’t enjoy this,” I said, accusing her. I meant our marriage, being alive together, the peculiar primacy of her own unhappiness, but she thought I was speaking about our absurd household game. I needed time; I didn’t correct her.

“You think it’s unmanly.” I was really angry. My causes multiplied. I would never get them sorted.

“It’s all right,” she said softly. She said “olright.” It was not all right.

“I don’t know how to be married,” I said, stalling her.

“My life is therapeutic,” I said. “My life is a cure for my life.” She let me go on.

A strange lassitude had come over me. Though I still thought about The Club, though it was still urgent— indeed, the idea kept percolating in my mind — there had been in my life a sort of substitution of intensities, as when one playing with a shaped balloon absently shifts volumes of air from one of its sections to another. It was difficult for me to do so many things at once.

In August we went with the Holiday-of-the-Month Club on a weekend trip. Gathered with forty-five other couples at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, we looked, with our overnight cases and our name plates, like so many kids going off to summer camp. All the women except Margaret were wearing slacks or Bermuda shorts. The men in their Bermuda shorts and knee-length stockings (I wore trousers) recalled to me city people I had seen out West in starched, fresh bluejeans, as though summer, like a distant state, were something in which they would forever be dudes. The members milled about casually, introducing themselves to us unself-consciously.

“We’re waiting for Mr. and Mrs. Jerry Cohen of Queens,” said Eddie, the tourmaster.

“Where we going this time, Eddie?” asked Dodo Shivitz of Great Neck, Long Island.

“Dodo baby, I’m surprised at you,” Eddie said, grinning.

“It’s a regular military secret,” Lorraine Land said.

“Come on, Eddie,” Dodo said. “Don’t be like that.” She turned to Margaret. “In May Eddie flew us to Miami. None of us had swim suits or anything. It was terrible.”

“Sealed orders are sealed orders,” Eddie said, and walked off to another group.

Al Medler, a fat man from Queens, said, “I’m not too crazy about surprises. There’s too much of a strain on the heart.”

“Your first time? I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure,” said a small dark man whose card identified him only as Harris. He shook my hand.

“We just joined,” I said.

“Oh, yes.”

“All you people seem to know each other,” Margaret said.

“We know each other all right,” Harris said. “That’s crap about the Jerry Cohens. They won’t show up. Mister is still sore from June.”

“What happened in June?” Margaret asked.

“Grossinger’s,” Harris said darkly.

“Oh.”

“Look a’ Eddie, look a’ Eddie,” Mrs. Sylvia Fend said. “He’s whispering to Gloria.”

“It’s not right,” Mrs. Land said.

“Live and let live,” Al Medler said. “It’s less strain on the heart.”

“She’s a w-h-o-r-e,” Harris said.

“She is?”

“Of course,” Harris said expertly. “I’ve studied the economics of this thing. Your average trip is ninety-five miles.”

“Miami?”

“Once a year there’s a big trip. You don’t know when it’s coming up, though you can count on its being off-season.”

“What’s that got to do with Gloria?” Mrs. Sylvia Fend asked.

“Well, you got to figure it costs the company with food and lodging and travel twenty-five cents a mile. That’s $23.75 per person per trip. They usually get about sixty couples each trip, but summer is the slow season because the members go on their own vacations with the kids. So Eddie has to call out Gloria to make up the difference.”

“You seem to know a lot about it,” Dodo Shivitz said.

“I’m an actuary. I got to keep up,” Harris said.

“I can’t get nobody to write me a policy,” Al Medler said.

“You’re too fat, Al,” Harris said.

I drew Margaret aside. “Margaret, this isn’t for us.”

“Why? It’s more fun than Book-of-the-Month,” Margaret said.

“All aboard,” Eddie shouted from the bottom step of the bus.

“Where’s Jerry Cohen, Eddie?” demanded Harris.

“All aboard.”

“What about Jerry Cohen?”

“Jerry’s a god-damned puritan sorehead,” Eddie said.

Everybody laughed.

“All right,” Eddie said. “All right. All aboard for Mysteryville. What’s it going to be this time, folks? North, east, south, west? Where she stops nobody knows. The management is not responsible for stolen or misplaced property. Keep your eye on your own wife.”

“Whooopee,” everybody said.

“S-e-x,” Harris said.

Margaret and I weren’t allowed to sit with each other on the bus. As soon as we stepped aboard Margaret was commandeered by a tall, good-looking man named Marvin Taylor. Mrs. Taylor, a small, pretty woman of about thirty-five, sat down beside me.

“Your lovely wife and yourself aren’t Jewish, if I may ask, are you” —she leaned across my chest and read my card—“Mr. Boswell?”

“No, we’re not, Mrs. Taylor.”

“If I may say so without giving offense, we Jews are usually better sports than you gentiles. Do you play badminton, sir?”

“No.”

“It’s not important,” she said. Sighing, she settled back into the deep seat.

“It’s just that a nice game of mixed doubles helps to break the ice,” she said suddenly. She laughed and turned around to address the couple behind us. “I was just telling Mr. Boswell here that a nice game of mixed doubles helps to break the ice. Pass it on.” She turned back to me. “Your wife is very lovely. I noticed it. You two must be very happy. But tell me, she isn’t native-born, is she?”

“She is the former Principessa Margaret dei Medici of Italy,” I said.

“That’s very funny,” she said. “That’s really very funny.” Then she startled me by reaching over and taking my hand. “I like goyim,” she said, leaning back against the seat dreamily.

“Some of my best friends are Jews,” I offered gallantly.

We had come out of the tunnel and were driving down the New Jersey Turnpike through country that looked like a huge, well-kept golf course. Mrs. Taylor had fallen asleep holding my hand and I took it back as gently as I could. Behind and around me I could hear the mixed doubles speculating about our destination. There seemed to be a strong feeling that we were going to Washington, D.C. Sylvia Fend didn’t believe this. “Washington in the summer?” she kept saying. “Are you kidding? The heat is terrific.” In two hours we had crossed into Pennsylvania and in another half hour the bus had left the turnpike. After a while the driver pulled off onto the side of the road and Eddie, who had been sitting in the back with Gloria, went up to speak to him. As he passed through the bus he was booed. He held up his hands good- naturedly.

“We’re lost,” Al Medler said. “The thing to do is keep calm.”

“It’s a rest stop,” J. Y. Krull said. “Come on, Gloria, it’s a rest stop.” Everybody laughed. Gloria thumbed her nose at J. Y. Krull. “Gloria!” he said.

“Well, come on then,” she said and stood up and stepped into the aisle. J. Y. Krull bolted out of his seat and everyone laughed.

“Oh, sit down,” Emma Lewen said, pulling at J. Y. Krull’s arm.

Mrs. Taylor had awakened and was rubbing her eyes. “Why’ve we stopped?” she asked. “Are we there?”

“Al Medler says we’re lost,” I said.

“What a way to run a railroad,” Mrs. Taylor said.

The bus turned around ponderously; apparently the driver had made a wrong turn ten miles back. Harris leaned across the aisle toward me. “Eddie’s sore,” he said. “The company lost about five bucks because of that mistake.”

“Really?” I said.

“Figure it out,” he said.

In another hour the bus turned into a twisting, pot-holed, narrow trail. After about twenty yards it was clear that the driver would not be able to go further.

“We’ll have to walk the rest of the way,” Eddie announced. “It’s not far.”

No one knew where we were, but clearly we were in the country. In the wooded foothills of something. Eddie made an announcement: “The Holiday-of-the-Month Club has brought you all for an unforgettable August weekend to beautiful Camp Starglow, just outside Windsor, Pennsylvania.” He explained that it was a kids’ summer camp but that we’d have it all to ourselves because the first session had just ended and the second wouldn’t begin until the middle of the next week. “Be careful what you leave lying around, won’t you?” he said. Everybody laughed.

Mrs. Taylor turned to me happily. “Did you bring your camping equipment?” she said.

“Mrs. Taylor,” I said, “despite my hearty good looks, I have a low sperm count and am a troubled man and a lousy sport.”

“You goyim,” she said, crinkling her nose.

“Just warn your husband,” I said calmly, “that if he so much as shakes hands with my wife I will break his legs for him.”

Mrs. Taylor stopped smiling. I could see I had disappointed her. She was not, after all, a bad woman; perhaps she was not even as silly as she seemed to be. Maybe this was just a routine — probably it was. At any rate, as she squeezed by me I felt I ought to make it up to her in some way. I pinched her behind. She turned on me furiously.

“It’s all talk, you,” she said in a low, dark voice. “That’s all it is,” she hissed. She began to cry.

“Look,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

The people filing past stopped to look at us. Spotting his wife, Taylor moved up the aisle through the crowd. “Here, what is this?” he demanded.

“Nothing,” I said. “It’s a mistake.”

“Marvin, be careful,” Mrs. Taylor sobbed.

“What is this?” Marvin said uncertainly.

“He’ll hurt you,” she said.

“Nobody’s going to hurt me,” Marvin said. His knees, below his Bermuda shorts, were shaking. I felt sorry for him.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just told your wife a filthy story and she took it the wrong way.”

“Oh,” he said, clearly relieved. “Is that all it is?” He lowered his voice and put his arm around his wife’s shoulders. “Honey,” he said, “you’ve got to be a sport about these things.” He winked at me.

“What’s going on?” Eddie said. He looked at Mrs. Taylor. “Hey, now,” he said, “the Holiday-of-the-Month Club is supposed to build up confidence. Otherwise what’s the good?”

“My fault,” I said.

I pushed past the people shuffling off the bus and caught up with Margaret. “Margaret, it’s a mistake,” I said. “Let’s pay the driver to take us back to the city.”

“Oh, Boswell,” Margaret said, “you’ve lost your sense of humor. My God, I know! You’re jealous of Marvin Taylor.”

“Nonsense,” I said, “it’s all t-a-l-k.”

The Taylors passed us. “See you later,” Marvin said significantly. He touched Margaret’s shoulder.

“I’m not a jealous man,” I said. “You have reason to know that. But I won’t raise another man’s child.”

“That’s ridiculous,” she said. “You’re ridiculous.”

“Accidents happen.”

“Do you actually think I’d sleep with Marvin Taylor?”

“Look, let’s not talk about it. You know how I feel.”

We followed Eddie to the guest lodge, and each couple was assigned a room. “Look,” Eddie said, “there’s something else. There are some cabins — not enough to go around or there wouldn’t be any problem, but I’ve got thirty keys. Who doesn’t think he’ll be wanting one?” Everybody groaned. “What a bunch,” Eddie said. “I never saw such a bunch. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves.” They laughed. “No volunteers, hey? No good sports in the crowd? Well, all right, all right We’ll auction them off. Proceeds to charity.”

“Crap,” Harris whispered to me. “He’d put the money in his pocket.”

Eddie help up a key and asked for a bid. The men laughed, but no one offered him anything for it. “All right,” he said at last, “I’ll throw them up in the air and you stallions can fight for them.” He flung the keys as high as he could and they came clattering down on the wooden floor of the lodge. Everyone scrambled for the loose keys. Eddie stood on the stairs and laughed. “What. a bunch,” he said. “Oh, well.”

In our room Margaret and I were changing into our bathing suits when someone tapped on the door. “Who is it?” Margaret asked.

“Oh, I’m sorry. I thought this was Mrs. Schmidt’s room.” It was Mrs. Taylor’s voice.

“That was your friend,” Margaret said.

I looked at her helplessly. “It’s pretty shabby, isn’t it?” I said.

“What’s shabby? This? This isn’t anything.”

“Our needs,” I said.

“Fuck it,” Margaret said.

I wondered again why she had married me. I suspected that when I finally knew, the reason would be dark, damaging. I wondered if 1 could ever be insane again, if I would ever recover my mad, unconfused Boswellian purposes.

“Let’s go down,” she said sadly.

That afternoon we swam and played basketball and threw softballs to each other. I am a good athlete, and though I had not done anything in a long time I moved with more certainty than any of the other men. I knew the women were watching me, and this was not unpleasant, but somehow I manipulated my body almost absently, with the peculiar preoccupation of someone in pain. Later we ate the sandwiches and drank the beer Eddie had brought from the town. That night, in slacks and heavy sweaters, we sat around the campfire which Eddie made and toasted marshmallows and drank bourbon. We sang “Going Home, Going Home” and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” That is, the others sang and I listened; I do not know the words to songs.

We lay stretched out on blankets ripped from our cots. I gazed at the stars and into the orange fire. In the dark I could see shapes moving, people changing blankets and going around the campfire like ghosts. Gradually the voices flagged. Couples lay locked in each other’s arms.

Eddie shouted suddenly. “Come on, wake up, wake up. Let’s dance. There’s a wind-up phonograph in the theater and some records. Hey, Boswell, you’re just with your own wife, so I won’t be disturbing you. Come on, give me a hand with them.”

“That stupid bastard,” I said.

“Oh, go ahead,” Margaret said. “Help him.”

“He’s a jerk.”

“Help him with the machine,” Margaret said.

I got up reluctantly and walked over toward Eddie. He was grinning foolishly and looked rather like a very stupid devil in the glare of the fire. “No offense, right?” Eddie said.

“None taken,” I said.

“Good. Good. Here’s the key. The stuff’s on the stage.”

“Aren’t you coming with me?”

“What, and let the fire go out? Mrs. Taylor here will go with you,” Eddie said slyly.

“Look, what’s the matter with you?” I asked him.

“Hey, hey, easy,” he said “What’s wrong? You got our literature. Didn’t you read between the lines?”

As a matter of fact I hadn’t even seen their literature. It was Margaret who had told me about the club. Mrs. Taylor moved up beside me and took my arm. “I’ve got a present for you,” she said as we moved off. She was drunk. “I mean it. Because you were so nice to Marvin before.”

“I thought I had made a mistake.”

“No,” she said. “No.” It was like a sad, escaping sigh.

“I’ve been wondering.”

“Life,” she said with weary significance. It might have been an epigram in French.

“Oh, come on, Mrs. Taylor, let’s get the damned phonograph.”

“Don’t you want your present?”

All right, I thought, if she kisses me, she kisses me.

“Give it to me,” I said.

She put a key into my hand. “It’s Marvin’s,” she giggled. “I took it out of his pants. He was so proud of getting one.”

“Oh, Jesus,” I said.

“Don’t you like a good time?”

Even the rhetoric of her sin was off-center. I thought of the men in their Bermuda shorts. For a moment I thought I was going to laugh.

“Don’t you like a good time?” she repeated.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

“I do,” she said. “I do. I’m talking about a good time. I’m talking about being with people. How many years do you think we have?” she said. She didn’t sound drunk.

“That’s ridiculous.”

“I’m no Gloria,” she said suddenly.

“It doesn’t make any difference,” I said.

“I’m a mother. I have a kid in camp.”

I did laugh.

“Yes,” she said giggling, “I see the joke, too. All the same, what does it mean? People have to be with people.”

“Is that what screwing is all about? People being with people?”

We went into the big wooden room the kids used as a theater. “Ooh,” Mrs. Taylor said, “there are always bats in these places. I was in a camp play when I was a kid — say, that wasn’t so long ago either — and there were bats above the stage in the whatdoyoucallit, eaves. If they get in your hair it’s a real mess.”

“Well, let’s just get the machine and the records and get out.” I switched on the lights.

“You’re terribly romantic,” Mrs. Taylor said. “Terribly.”

The machine was on the stage, the records beside it. “If you take these I’ll bring the phonograph.” I handed her some old 78’s.

“Why, they’re camp songs,” Mrs. Taylor said without looking at them. “Why bother? They can grind this stuff out for themselves. He wouldn’t want these.”

“What does he want?” I asked.

“He wants people to be happy,” Mrs. Taylor said. “You don’t understand anything.”

“I certainly don’t understand this place.”

“Didn’t you read the literature?”

“That’s the second time I’ve been asked that. I’m beginning to wonder how they send it through the mails.”

“Oh, he made a joke,” Mrs. Taylor said.

“Come on,” I said. “My wife is waiting.”

She hoisted herself onto the stage. “I doubt it,” she said.

“Cut it out,” I said. “What I said about Marvin’s legs still goes.”

“I don’t like to hear talk like that,” she said seriously. She had a way of drifting in and out of drunkenness.

“Mrs. Taylor,” I said. “Mother, I think we can go back now.” When she reached down for me to help her off the stage I put the key in her hand.

Walking back we could hear the voices of the club members raised in some soft, sad song. Perhaps it was just our distance from them but the voices seemed thinner now. “That herd’s been cut,” I said.

“You really don’t want to sleep with me, do you?” she asked.

“No.”

“Is it me? I’m too pushy, I think.”

“Not at all,” I said. “You’re as demure as someone in a nursery rhyme.”

“This little piggy went to market,” Mrs. Taylor intoned forlornly.

We were walking back through the trees toward the distant fire. “Oh, that song is so sad,” she said. “Camp songs make me cry. They don’t make you cry, do they?”

“I’m a very callous person, Mrs. Taylor.”

“No,” she said. “I’ll bet you’re not. Not deep down inside yourself.”

“Oh, Jesus,” I said. I was anxious to get back and find Margaret and break Marvin’s legs.

“This will be the last time you come on one of these weekends, I guess. I’ll bet she really was some kind of princess or whatever. You both have a lot of style.”

“When you’re the King of France,” I sad, “it shows.”

“Yeah, you,” she said. She poked me playfully. “You know,” she said, “it may sound funny, but this club saved our marriage, mine and Marvin’s.”

“That does sound funny.”

“No. I really mean it. Oh, I don’t suppose we would have broken up or anything, but it… well, gave “us an interest.”

“You’ve got to have an interest.”

She went on without hearing me. The truth, finally, was what I had begun to suspect. I was far more interested in her, in her motives, in what she had to say, than she was in me. “You know what it is?” she asked. “It’s not the pleasure. What’s that, two minutes? I don’t give a damn for the pleasure. That’s just a mechanical, chemical thing that doesn’t have anything to do with us. I’ll tell you the truth, you would probably have been disappointed in me after all my talk. I’m not very good at it. And it’s not what you could call love. It’s just the idea that somebody wants you — all right, your body, but you are your body. Just to lay like that in somebody’s arms, knowing you’re the only thing just then that he’s thinking of. You know something? I think that if the house were to catch fire just then, or if there was a tiger, he’d save you. No matter what it meant. The same guy that might run right over you in a burning theater, he’d save you. It’s funny. Being like that with somebody softens you. Even fat old Medler. He’s who I was with last time.”

“Medler?”

“What’s wrong with him? He’s alive. I’ll say.” She laughed. “It’s just being with somebody. Loneliness is the most awful thing in the world.”

“Loneliness is nothing,” I said.

We came back to the group and I looked for Margaret. The blanket we had been sitting on was gone, and so was Marvin.

I rushed up to Eddie. “Where’s my wife?”

“Well, how should I know?” he said.

“Look,” I said, “tourmaster, pimp, where’s my wife? I’m asking for the last time.” The others had stopped singing and were listening to me.

“We don’t need members like you,” Eddie shouted. “Tough guy. I’m tearing up your membership card. Don’t worry, don’t worry, you’ll get your lousy money back. What I want to know is if you don’t like people why’d you join a club like this in the first place?”

“That’s enough. Where’s Taylor? Where’s Taylor?” I shouted.

I saw someone get off a blanket. “I’m here,” Taylor said weakly. “What do you want?” The woman he was with wasn’t Margaret

“Nothing,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“Some guy,” Eddie said.

“Telling off a member like that, that’ll cost the company,” Harris said.

“If it was out of my own pocket,” Eddie said, “I wouldn’t care. The guy’s a jealous jerk. What’d he come here for anyway? Storm trooper!”

“Eddie’ll have a heart attack,” Al Medler said.

“Hey, Medler, your girlfriend’s waiting for you,” I said.

“Okay, all right,” Medler said, getting to his knees, “a fat man’s got to move slowly in affairs of the heart. Pass it on.”

“You’re degenerates,” I shouted.

“Let’s lift our voices in song,” I heard a woman call. It was Mrs. Taylor. “Everybody. Everybody.”

She started to sing. “‘Keep the home fires burning,’” she sang in a thin, reedy voice, and slowly the others joined her. As I walked toward the lodge they began other songs, going quickly after a few bars from one to the next. They sang of wars they had never fought, of losses they had never sustained. They were gathered on a darkling Pennsylvania plain, far behind the lines, singing, forgetting the words, appropriating the harmony for themselves, convinced of a heroic desolation, toasting their sadness in the big campfire like another marshmallow. “‘It’s a long way,’” they sang, “’to Tipperary.’” It is indeed, I thought.

The light in our room shone beneath the door like a bright brass threshold. Margaret was in bed, reading.

“Margaret,” I said, “why did you marry me?”

She pretended not to look startled. It was a princessly gesture but it did not come off. “I had my reasons,” she said at last.

“I’ll bet you did,” I said. It had actually crossed my mind that I might have been a front man in some international plot. “What were they?”

“Why?”

“Because I must understand how I’m being used.”

“You’ll never understand that”

“Ah,” I said.

“Did you enjoy your walk with Mrs. Taylor?”

“I didn’t touch Mrs. Taylor.”

“I know that,” she said.

“You don’t seem very grateful for my fidelity.”

“You have no fidelity,” she said.

I was enjoying the conversation. People with unnamable sorrows touch and awe me. Margaret now struck me as one of these. It was very adult talk, I thought. I had the impression that our voices had actually changed— that my flat, midwestern vowels had rounded and that Margaret’s faint, Italianate English had become somehow Middle-European, the sound of a queen rather than a princess.

“Why did you marry me?” I repeated.

“Oh,” she said, “love.”

Outside the voices swelled. “‘Oh, bury me not,’” they sang, “‘on the lone prair-ee.’”

I waited for her to go on. She sat up in bed, and the sheet fell away from the royal breasts.

“‘Where the coyotes howl,’” they sang, “‘and the wind is free.’”

“A famous American folk song,” I said. “Jesus, these people feel sorry for themselves.”

Margaret was staring at me.

“Let me understand you,” I said. “Did you love me?”

“I’ve just told you.”

“But what was the mystery?”

“That’s the mystery.”

“Just that?”

“Yes.”

“Only that?”

“Yes.” She turned away.

“Well, that ties it,” I said, suddenly exploding. “That really does. That ties it. You’re the one who should have gone walking with Mrs. Taylor.”

“You’re insane.”

“I’m harmless.” I giggled. “Like everyone else.”

“What is it you want?” she shouted suddenly.

“What everybody wants,” I said calmly. “What you want, what Mrs. Marvin Taylor wants.”

“Happiness,” Margaret said contemptuously.

“Screw happiness. Immorality.”

It was odd, finally, to be in a position to say no, to deny others with a clear, free conscience. It came with age, I supposed. But really there was nothing to it. It was just an illusion of power. No one had any real power. No one did except maybe suicides in the brief moment between their self-violence and their deaths.

“Well,” I said, “cheer up, Principessa. And move over.”

“I don’t want to make love,” she said.

I shrugged.

“There are other people alive,” Margaret said after a while.

“Millions,” I said. “Zillions. That’s my point. It would be pretty silly to try to care for all of them.”

“I wasn’t suggesting that you care for all of them.”

“Oh,” I said. “I see. One for one. Double up. Like the buddy system.” I sat down on the edge of the bed.

“I don’t want to make love, I tell you,” Margaret said.

“In that case, pass the brochure. I want to read the literature.”

IV

Finally I understood what the trouble was. I had been confused by alternatives, overwhelmed by the extraordinary complications of ordinary life. Some men — and I was one — could function only under a pressure, a deadline, a doom. One hones himself against his needs, so he had better understand what those are.

But maybe, too, there had been a certain good husbandry in my bad marriage. There were, after all, natural laws — who knew it better? — and perhaps men, like farms, like phoenixes, had to lie low once in a while. Like Lome’s scrap iron and lint, nothing was ever a total loss; everything went on working for one, counting for something better than it seemed to. There was just so much faith that one could put in serendipity, however, and I decided that it was time to make a change in my life.

Compromises and disguises were out. The King of England walking Harlem in a zoot suit is only a white man in funny clothes. His Highness knows where his Highness’ bread is buttered. The secret agents, with guns, with transistor equipment, are right behind him. There has to be a deep amnesia of the soul. Indigence is the one thing you can’t fake. Low birth is all some of us have.

Still, the solution wasn’t to leave Margaret, only to get away from her. Divorce or separation would just have been a further complication. I had to get outside again, to enter the world like a nun in reverse. I recognized the difficulties. They talk about the nouveaux riches, and one knows what to expect, what to avoid, but who ever heard of the nouveaux poor, the nouveaux stricken?

One afternoon I told Margaret I felt guilty about my life.

“You’re just bored,” she said.

“No,” I said, “it would be wrong for me to be bored. I don’t do anything. I make no contribution. For the first time in my life I’m uneasy about people less fortunate than myself.” It was true in a way; at least it would have been if such people existed. I told her I had volunteered my services in the Police Athletic League and that I would be teaching Puerto Ricans body-building in a gym on the East Side. I don’t think she believed me. It was not a very inspired lie, but even its baldness served because it announced to Margaret that I was up to something, that I did not want to be disturbed.

The next day I took a room in a boarding house off Fifty-eighth Street and went to a pawnshop on Eight Avenue to lay in a wardrobe. I told the pawnbroker that I was an actor, that I needed a certain kind of clothes for the part I was playing, not seedy so much as shabby, and not shabby so much as tasteless, and not tasteless so much as anonymous.

“I see him as a guy in the bleachers,” I said. “He drinks beer. You know? Probably he’s not really from New York at all. Probably he’s originally from Gary, Indiana. He wears black shoes and powder-blue socks.”

“A hayseed,” the pawnbroker said.

“Well, yes and no,” I said. “My conception is more of a guy used to hard work in a factory, or somebody who wraps packages in a stockroom. He likes to watch people bowl. He likes to be comfortable. He wears wind- breakers. His pants turn over his belt.”

“Yeah,” the pawnbroker said, interested. “I think I see what you’re getting at. He could probably afford better but he’s ignorant.”

“That’s it.”

“He’s got underwear with big red ants painted on it,” the pawnbroker said.

“He wears wide ties.”

“There’s a loud pattern on his socks,” the pawnbroker said.

“Oh, an awful one,” I said.

“Yeah,” the pawnbroker said. “Yeah.”

“His wife is a waitress,” I said.

“Sure,” the pawnbroker said, “and now he drives a bus because he strained his back in the factory.”

“His sister’s married to an enlisted man stationed in West Germany,” I said.

The pawnbroker stroked his long jaw. “That’s a tall order,” he said. He came from behind the counter and studied me. “You got some size on you, God bless you.”

“It would be all right if the clothes were a little small,” I said. “That would heighten the effect, you see.”

“Maybe I got something in the back,” the pawnbroker said.

“Go see.”

He brought out exactly what I needed. It was as though the twelve men we had been describing had died back there. “See if these work,” he said, handing me some clothing.

“Have you been in show business too?” I asked.

“I’ve just got an interest,” he said shyly. ’ I tried on the clothes and the pawnbroker leaned back against the counter and admired me. “You look like a different person,” he said.

I laughed. “That’s very funny,” I said.

“To tell you the truth,” he said after I had decided which clothes I would take, “I don’t know what to charge for this stuff. On the one hand it’s all old, unclaimed, but on the other hand it’s a very good costume. What the hell, three pants, shoes, all those stockings, a jacket — say fifteen bucks.”

My hand was reaching for my wallet when I stopped myself. “Listen,” I said, “fifteen bucks is very fair. As you say, these aren’t old clothes, but a very artistic costume. If that’s your price I’ll pay it. But I just thought. You say you’re interested in the theater.”

“I don’t want no passes,” the pawnbroker said, suspicious.

“No, of course not,” I said. “Of course not. I just had an idea. Listen, let me give you your fifteen dollars.” I reached into my wallet and took out the money and extended it, but the pawnbroker hesitated.

“What was your idea?” he asked.

“Well,” I said, “you know the Playbill they give out?”

He nodded.

“Well, did you ever notice the credits? I mean where it says ‘Furs by Fendrich,’ ‘Jewelry by Tiffany’? Look, I’m no businessman, but I happen to know that that sort of thing is the most prestigious advertising space anybody can get.” I lowered my voice. “It’s payola.”

“I’ve wondered about those credits,” the pawnbroker said.

“Well, of course,” I said. “Now suppose we put it in that Al’s clothes — that’s the character’s name that I’m portraying — were donated by” —I looked through the pile of second-hand cameras and radios and musical instruments to the name inverted on the window—“Charley’s Pawn Shop.”

“My clientele don’t go much to the theater,” the pawnbroker said.

“That’s not the point. For one thing it would be a gag. On the other hand it would polish the image of the profession.”

He thought about it for a while. “What’s the name of your show?” he said finally.

“The Dying Gladiator.”

“It’s not very catchy,” he said.

“Those things are worked out in New Haven.” I held out the money again. The pawnbroker looked at it for a second and then waved it away. “What the hell,” he said, “it’ll be a good joke.”

“It will,” I said. “It is.”

I went back to my room with the old clothes. Already I felt better. There are certain people who are not happy unless they get something wholesale; others, like myself, do not possess a thing unless they have had it for nothing. It was the old water into wine principle, a little harmless miracle-making. That afternoon I felt as if I were making a comeback.

Each morning I kissed Margaret like someone going away to the office and walked the few blocks to my shabby rented room. In my old clothes I was a new man. In a week I was ready.

I went into a restaurant and strolled by a table the waitress had not yet cleared. I picked up her tip for courage, for luck. Using the dime I had stolen, I went into the phone booth and called the Ford Foundation.

When I gave a secretary my name and asked to be put through to the director she hesitated, so I gave her a little razzle-dazzle. “This is Detroit calling, baby,” I said. “Get it? De-troit!”

She said she’d try to connect me; she must have been a new girl. Years before I had discovered the uses of the big Foundations. We were on good terms. I had suggested projects to them and they regarded me as an interested amateur. I was on their mailing lists. I knew, for example, where all the young poets were, the novelists. At one time I used to keep a map with little pins in it, like something in a War Room. I could put my finger on any of those fellows, any time I wanted.

“Harley,” I said, “it’s Jimmy Boswell. I’m sorry I had to scare the little girl, but it was urgent. I’ve had a scheme, Harley, which you people might be interested in. My word of honor, Harley, I haven’t gone to The Guggenheim with this yet.”

I told him about The Club. He was very interested, but vague when I tried to pin him down.

“Could I get a commitment on this right away, Harley? Twenty-five thousand a year is all it would take.”

“It’s cheap, Boswell,” Harley admitted, “but you must appreciate how the Foundation works.”

“My God, Harley, I’m only talking about twenty-five thousand dollars a year. You could take it out of the stamp fund.”

“Well, it’s not that, Boswell.”

“Bring three poets back from Yucatán,” I said. “Call off two musicologists. You don’t really believe there’s a future in that electronic stuff, do you?”

“Boswell, believe me, it isn’t the money.”

“Well,” I said a little more softly, “the truth is I’ve never known you people to be mean. What is it, Harley? Is the plan no good? I’d like a straight answer on this.”

“Boswell, the idea is good — it’s sound. But don’t you think it’s a little, well, snobbish?”

“Ah,” I said. I was grinning.

“Well, after all,” Harley said.

“The Rockefeller may not be so fastidious, Harley,” I warned.

“Now, Boswell…” Harley said.

“The Guggenheim and The Carnegie may have different views.”

“Boswell…” Harley said.

“The Fund for the Republic people may think along other lines.”

“Please…” Harley said.

“Well, dammit, Harley, if it’s not too snobbish for The Fund for the Republic people, I don’t see what you have to be so squeamish about.” My grin had folded into an open smile; I couldn’t keep a straight face; I almost doubled up; my nose was running. Here I was in a phone booth in the Columbus Circle subway station, with the little rubber-bladed fan whirling merrily away, and the light going on and off as I opened and shut the door not fifty feet away from the mad faggot in the stall in the men’s toilet peeping through a hole at the businessmen standing before the urinals; here I was, James Boswell, orphan. Herlitz-placed, Mr. America in second-hand pants, lawful husband of the Principessa Margaret dei Medici of All the Italies, being apologized to by the director of The Ford Foundation.

“Why are you laughing?” Harley asked.

“What’s that? Excuse me?”

“What are you laughing at?”

“Well, you’ll forgive me, Harley, but your remark about snobbishness strikes me as just a little absurd.”

“Does it?” Harley said coolly.

“Well, figure it out,” I said. “You and I are both dedicated to a kind of talent elite. Anyway, Princeton and Palo Alto have been doing this sort of thing, only on a bigger scale, for years.”

Harley thought about that awhile and I thought, It’s grand to swing, it is grand to be a swinger. If it were ever my fate to be executed for something, I would hope they would hang me. Fitting — a broken neck and a hard-on. What more could anybody get from life?

“I’m sorry, Boswell,” Harley said at last. “I’ll certainly take it under advisement, but I can’t hold out any more hope than that at this time.”

“Harley,” I said, “you leave me no alternative. I’m going to The Lace.”

“What’s The Lace? I don’t think I’ve ever heard of The Lace.”

“Now who’s being a snob, Harley?” I said, and hung up.

My conversation with Harley, like my conversation with the pawnbroker, made me feel marvelous. My year of relative retirement had changed me, made me stronger. I could put people off now. It was odd; taking them in and putting them off came finally to the same thing. There was freedom in it. I gazed happily at my shiny, unpressed pants, my windbreaker’s broken zipper. The abuses, I thought proudly, the abuses of adversity. So be it. Amen. If I could not do anything about death I could at least do something about something else, do something about men. Let me at them! I could con the fat cats of the world, the wizards and counselors and generals and poets, the people with power or ideas who lived, I saw, with a terrible unconsciousness, like sleek, expensive, ticking bombs. The progress of a hero worshiper was inexorable. The Italian cynic, Neal Admirari, was right. No man is a hero to anyone he’s been introduced to. I had lived my life as a kind of Irishman, in forests of imagination searching under mushrooms for elves and leprechauns. Now I was entitled to shout that that they didn’t exist. I had earned disbelief. Whee, I thought. Here comes Boswell!

I would have to see Nate, but first I went back to my room. So long as my plan was still unrealized I needed time to relish and contemplate each step. That night I didn’t go back to Margaret. I lay on the bed in my room and listened to a man shout at a woman down the hall. I heard him hit her; I heard her scream. I lay there testing my loneliness, feeling my singleness as one might cautiously put pressure on a sprained ankle. I needed to forget not that I knew Margaret and David and that I had lived with them, but that they had known and lived with me. I had to imagine myself forgotten, dead, someone who had lived seven hundred years before in a country that had kept no records. I had to imagine myself not born yet.

I waited two more days. I took my meals in the Automat during the busy hours and sat next to others who spooned their soup and chewed their sandwiches as if I were invisible. You’ve got to get used to it. You’re a long time dead.

On Thursday afternoon I went to Nate’s. When he saw me in my old clothes he broke into a broad smile. “Margaret’s left him,” he said to Perry. “Margaret’s left you,” he said.

“No,” I said. “Pick up my tabs, Nate.”

“Jimmy, you’re a rich man. What are you talking about?”

“Nate, it kills me. It stifles my creativity.” I told him about the room I had rented. He laughed.

“Pick up my tabs again, Nate.” I had discovered the secret of Nate’s indifference to me since I had married Margaret. Anyone who is around the successful too much develops a passion for the occasional failure. Now I was no longer of any use to him.

“It wouldn’t be the same thing, Jimmy. You don’t need it any more.”

“I need it.”

“Well, a cup of the arctic lichen,” he told Perry, “for Jimmy and me. For auld lang syne, Jimmy.”

Perry muttered something I couldn’t hear and signaled to a waiter standing by an enormous gilt samovar.

“Nate,” I said when Perry had poured our tea, “I’ve got a terrific proposition for you. What did I cost you in the old days? Five hundred, six hundred a year?”

Nate sipped his tea. I picked up my cup and drank from it quickly; it was as awful as I had remembered it.

“Some years a little more, maybe. But that’s a fair average, I’d say.”

“Okay,” I said. “Peanuts.”

“Wait a minute,” Nate said.

“Peanuts, Nate. I’ve got a bank account of my own now. Peanuts are peanuts. I have an idea, Nate, that could cost you twenty-five thousand dollars a year at the very least.”

“Hey, wait a minute,” Nate said.

“Nate, forgive me, you’re a fool.”

“Hey, wait a minute.”

“A fool,” I said. “Short-sighted. You do not see even the topmost E on the eye charts. That E is for eternity, Nate! Where will you spend eternity? Nate? Where will you spend eternity?”

“Hey, wait a minute.”

“What have you got here? A fancy clip-joint. Five forks and spoons in the Michelin Guide. Dorothy Kilgallen puts your name in the papers. The movie stars come after the world premieres. Signed pictures on the wall— Nate with Shirley Temple, Nate with Robert Mitchum, Nate with Jimmy Stewart.”

“Nate with Senator McCarthy,” Nate said. “Nate with John Foster Dulles.”

“Republicans, Nate, Republicans. Where will you spend eternity? It’s nothing. You’re living on borrowed time, do you know that? What do you think history will have to say? That Dag Hammarskjöld once had lunch here? That you turned out the only decent ground-reindeer-horn cakes in New York?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I am talking about history, Nate. I’m talking about history, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Do you even have sons? Do you even have sons? Who gets this place when you die? Perry? You won’t be cold six months when somebody’ll whisper in his ear: ‘Perry’s Place.’ Perry’s Place. It has a nice ring, he thinks; Nate’s dead, I’m alive, he thinks. Perry’s Place. Perry’s Place. Two weeks later your sign comes down and a new one goes up. PERRY’S PLACE. With, if you’re lucky, a footnote: ‘Formerly Nate’s.’ Formerly Nate’s! What the hell kind of write-up is that? I’m talking about history. Do you think that as of today you’re history? Do you think it is even peeping at you as it scans Forty-seventh Street? Don’t kid yourself.”

“I don’t know what you want me to do,” Nate said.

“Nate, have you ever heard of the Algonquin Round Table?”

“Are you nuts? Sure I heard of it. Dorothy Parker, F. P. Adams, Woollcott — that crowd. Sure I heard of it.”

“It was nothing,” I said. “Nothing. Journalists. They had a better press than you. It was in the family. But what I’m talking about is history.”

“History,” Nate said.

“A Club.”

“A club,” Nate said.

“The Club! I could go to the Foundations with this thing, Nate. They’d back it in a minute. But what would happen? The Hilton Chain would do the catering. Pasty little sandwiches for the gullets of the great. It isn’t to be thought of. I owe it to you — you owe it to yourself. And if not to yourself, then what about Perry? What do you think history would do with someone like Perry? He’d be sensational. He’d be magnificent, the sullen little bastard. They’d call him ‘Perry.’ Just like that, his first name. Whole generations would come to know his picturesque, miserable ways. And if they’d do that for Perry, what wouldn’t they do for you? I’m giving you a chance to be respectable, Nate. The Algonquin Round Table was nothing compared to this. Think of it, Nate. Your place. Your place in history. Once a month, through your doors—” I pointed to the doors. “Through your doors would pour the cream of the scientific, political and intellectual worlds. That crowd. To sit at your tables.” I pointed to the tables. “I’m talking history to you, Nate.”

“You’re crazy.”

“They’d have to work the Presidential Inauguration around our schedule.”

“You’re nuts.”

“Stockholm would have to be advised of our meeting dates so as not to interfere with the Awards.”

“Insane.”

“The universities would have to agree to set some fixed date for their June graduation in order to get our speakers.”

“Have some more arctic lichen,” Nate said.

“Wars would be declared only on days we weren’t meeting. Once a month the world would go to bed secure, knowing the bombs couldn’t fall that night.”

“Perry, bring us an orchid salad.”

“The TV people would probably want to block off the street.”

“Perry, two whooping crane steaks. Rare.”

“We wouldn’t allow anyone to take pictures inside the place. Like Parliament. Like Congress.”

“Balinese wonder pudding, Perry.”

“We might have to set up a special table for the Secret Service men. Some of these babies can’t go anywhere without them.”

“And — and — and ice water!” Nate cried, ecstatic.

“The Russians would send spies.”

“It’s marvelous. Marvelous.”

“Once a year we’d pose for an official portrait. We might even authorize some candid shots of the members. Yes! They’d turn up years later in attics. Skira would collect them and publish them in a book.”

“Eat. Eat your orchid,” Nate said happily.

I stuffed a purple petal into my mouth. “Nate,” I said, “do you trust me? Let me work out the arrangements. I promise you a Club. I’ll get the biggest people, the biggest. The first meeting in two months. We’ll turn this place into a pantheon of the famous.”

“It’s marvelous, Jimmy,” Nate said. He was chewing the tough flowers fiercely. A bit of bluish bloom stuck to his chin.

“I’ve got to get started,” I told him and got up.

“But your dinner,” Nate said. “The whooping crane. The Balinese wonder pudding.”

“Later, Nate. There are too many things to do. The orchid salad was actually very filling.”

On the way out I brushed past Perry in his white dinner jacket with its subtle bulge. “Everything to your taste, sir?” he asked, grimly smiling.

“Excellent, Perry, excellent. My compliments to the gardener!”

V

Now it came to pass that in those days a call went out… Tee hee hee.

If you get a one per cent return on junk mail you’re doing well. Starting cold I couldn’t hope even for that. Was I Sears Roebuck announcing a January White Sale? I was a stranger inviting presidents and kings to my party.

The problems were staggering. In comparison a bride puzzling how to distribute thirty-five or fifty invitations among relatives and friends numbering in the hundreds had as little to do as a ranch cook ringing a bell to call hired hands to supper. There was a plethora of exceptional people in the world. In the old days you had a king, a half dozen nobles, a few ministers of state— maybe a handful of others, a poet laureate, perhaps, a court architect, a genius working in a basement. But today! A world where people could seek their own level worked against me. There were sixteen thousand, four hundred fifty-three people listed in the current Who’s Who—and that just took in America. Nate could accommodate two hundred. Which two hundred?

Ruthlessly I hacked away at those parts of my plan which I saw were impracticable. Although I originally hoped for The Club to be genuinely international in character, once I got down to it I realized that the problems of transportation and expense to foreign members were prohibitive. They might come once. (This raised the problem, too, of monthly meetings; it was too much. We could meet quarterly, perhaps.) So now I figured on only token foreign representation, ten places to revolve among important non-nationals. Admittedly this made The Club one-sided, like calling seven games between two American baseball teams a World Series, or naming the winner in a competition that never attracted entries from more than four countries the World Heavyweight Champion. But what could I do?

Next, how could I be sure that the most important people would, in combination, be good mixers? A minor point, of course — what counted was that they come, not that they enjoy themselves. Also, great men are not notably gregarious. I’d have to impress upon them the exclusivity of the project, the summit conferency tone of the thing.

The problems of organization were appalling. Like many obsessed men, however, I am like a scientist when it comes to working out the technical obstacles to my obsession. I classified and sub-classified like a biologist. I made experiments. Once I wrote down the names of a dozen men in a particular field and discovered from this single list an invaluable lesson: There are essentially two kinds of men, the practitioner and the theoretician, and although the theoretician is often the weightier in history’s scales, it is the practitioner to whom the glamour attaches. To strike a balance it was necessary that both classes be represented. Delicate proportions had to be established, for I saw that this problem was inextricably linked to the problem of the selection of categories. Who was to say that a zoölogist did not do more finally to change the world than a surgeon, or that a writer of popular songs didn’t have a greater effect than either?

Now I was involved in the very heart of my problem, for I was beginning to consider the issue of fame and power. Was I after something that was ultimately quantitative or qualitative? In whom was I actually interested, the guy on stage or the fellow in the wings? This was not an organizational so much as a metaphysical issue, and I saw I was dealing with nothing less than the old business of appearance and reality. What, I had to ask myself, were my aims? My character gave me the answer: I had none. In the final analysis I was involved in creating an effect, merely an effect. If I concerned myself with these issues it was only to the extent that they reflected on that effect. I saw myself again as someone without collective or contiguous purpose in the world — as someone, finally, without community or continuity. What I cared about, I discovered, was The Club, not the people who would be in it. Like any zealot I thought not in terms of ends, but at once and at last of the old ineluctable self. That, it turned out, was the principle of the thing. Hey, I thought, you’ve the makings of a leader yourself. The stuff of greatness is in you. With that established, all my finicky concern to strike a balance became irrelevant. I had unnecessarily confused myself. Now I saw that I had to be arbitrary, artistic rather than thorough, theatrical rather than scientific.

A gathering of zoölogists and lapidaries and musicologists was too tame; it was beside the point. I needed doers, not dons. One had to go, then, not where the power was, but where it seemed to be. So in the end I had to look no further than the newspapers or any other mirror of popular opinion. I threw away my Who’s Who and took up my Time—the categorical techniques of which nicely fitted my scheme, incidentally. By poring over the last two years’ back issues and collating the most frequently alluded to names I soon had a practical, workable list of potential members.

To my shock, however, I discovered that while I had some tenuous access (through friends, through friends’ friends) to many of the people on my list, I had nothing like the first-hand knowledge of them I needed. I had thought I had done better than that, and I saw that I was dependent on The Club to complete the circle of my intimacies. Of the two hundred people I picked as first choices, I knew only nine well (that, is, only nine knew me) and had been introduced to only fifty-seven others. How I would get the remaining hundred and thirty-four to come to The Club I didn’t know, but at last, starting with my basic nine, I hit upon the idea of an elaborate series of chain letters. (It seemed far-fetched until I remembered that Christ Himself had started with only twelve apostles.) Thus, Nate could be responsible for Frank Sinatra, Sinatra for Darryl Zanuck, and so on. From my reading and personal knowledge I worked out detailed charts demonstrating the overlapping of thousands of relationships, like some cosmic genealogist showing the real though attenuated connections between apparent strangers. Incest, I saw, was a real principle at work in the world.

I was still faced with the problem of reserves, of creating alternates for first choices who would not or could not attend. Now my problem was the reverse of what it had been in the beginning. Then I had been overwhelmed by the apparent superfluity of the eminent; now I was aware that any substitution was bound to be unsatisfactory.

It was the creation of the second team, however, that ultimately brought out my most exquisite sense of nuance and that made the fiercest demands on my artistic imagination. Again I created not power itself but the illusion of power and glamour in depth. A Magi done with mirrors, as it were. In a way I was almost sorry when later I had to scratch off each alternate candidate as first choices made their decisions to come. (It would have been one more thing I had gotten away with.)

Once my lists were prepared the real work began. There were instructions to give the basic nine, schedules and suggestions for follow-ups. All this took time and I saw that the first meeting would have to be pushed back another two months. It was necessary, too, to guarantee the loyalty of my nine workers. Margaret and Nate were easy, of course, but many of the others I had not seen in years. I set aside three weeks for winning them over, and began by trying to revive their interest in the old flamboyant Boswell.

DR. MORTON PERLMUTTER. INSTITUTE OF MAN. UNIFERSITY OF ILLINOIS. CHAMPAIGN, ILLINOIS. I AM BEHIND CONVOCATION OF CAPTAINS OF INDUSTRY, ARTS, MANKIND, RELIGION AND WHAT HAVE YOU. FANTASTIC OPPORTUNITY TO STUDY LIFE AS IT IS LIVED AT THE TOP. MORE FUN THAN A FIELD TRIP TO PAPUA. FREE EATS. FREE SPEECH. FREE LOVE. NATE’S PLACE. NEW YORK. DETAILS FOLLOW.

My Dear Rabbi Messerman, Shalom:

Your presence is respectfully requested at the charter meeting of a new spiritual organization whose membership will be made up of the world community’s leading religious and secular authorities. Although I will not burden you now with the full details, we are hoping to attract some of the Yeshiva people in Cincinnati, as well as several of the more important goyim.

When further details and the reservation blank arrive, please indicate whether you prefer fish or fowl.

Field Marshal Augustus Lano,

Presidential Ranch House,

Los Farronentes, QR.

I am sending you this through one of my contacts in the International Red Cross in the hopes that it reaches you in time.

There is about to be established in New York a new secret organization whose purpose, the vis-à-vis confrontation of world leaders in an atmosphere of peaceful cordiality, is one which I am sure you must endorse.

It will be necessary for you to come to America for this. Because of the willful perversity of an unfortunate official policy toward you your current status is one of persona non grata, and it may be more convenient if you could arrange to come up by two-man submarine through the St. Lawrence Seaway. You could swim to Cleveland and make it from there to the Turnpike and New York. However I leave these details to you. More follows.

Today Los Farronentes, Q.R. Tomorrow the world, eh, Lano? P.S. How’s the crabgrass?

Dear Harold Flesh,

Some of the boys thought Nate’s. Hush hush. Q.T. S.S. N.K.V.D.

These I followed with other letters — matey, detailed, sincere. I sent brochures, gifts, reply-prepaid telegrams. With some of these men I had, in our mutual past, already vaguely alluded to a Club, for this was not a new idea with me. Many were used to doing me favors, but I let them see that no favor they had ever done me was quite complete without this one; I played on their sense of being allowed to participate in a human continuum outside their own, generating in them not duty, not love, but the high privilege of knowing some human fact in perspective — a small immortality. No one knew as well as I the irresistible appeal of the words “for old time’s sake.” Ultimately, of course, they had to come round.

Then I set to work on the other fifty-seven. Again I wrote letters, feeling something already historical and marked about the very pen that inscribed “Mon cher Picasso,” “Dear Oppenheimer,” “Exquisite Miss Taylor,” and taking an almost physical pleasure just in folding the paper and addressing and sealing the envelopes. It was as though, stamped, these already enjoyed the status of official documents, artifacts, the thin, blue, barber-pole- edged airmail envelopes like a kind of money. I sent the letters special delivery; it was satisfying to know that they would have to be signed for, that whoever got my letter would see my name, my handwriting, handle something I had handled. It was only the spurious tactility of the famous, the special sense that they alone could give of possessing an almost healing power in their touch. It was only the barbarous, talismanic power of the autograph book, and I should have known better, but for the time I was caught up.

On a chart I devised I kept a strict accounting of when and to whom a letter had been sent. I allowed three days and then followed up the letter with a person-to- person phone call from the booth in the Columbus Circle subway station. It was perhaps the most intensely active period of my life. I didn’t spare myself for a moment. My room on Fifty-eighth Street became my office; stationary, stamps, rough drafts of letters, charts, lists and telegram blanks were everywhere. I felt like Marx loose in the Bronx. Late into every night I wrote, rendered, revised, polished, aiming in these letters to the fifty-seven for the fat, safe, exactly perfect pitch of ultimate respectability.

It was spring and warm for that time of year in New York. I worked away with the windows flung wide, unconscious of hunger, discomfort, heat, weariness, time. It must have been then that I caught the draft.

VI

The cough was dry, hard, a sustained and piercing howl from the chest. I could bring nothing up with it. Worse during the day, it seemed to have something to do with the light itself, with the very sunshine. It didn’t seem to have any connection with my body. My throat did not tickle; my chest, when I blew out long, deep experimental exhalations, seemed clear. But every so often the rhythm of my existence was broken by a sudden, irrelevant explosion, strident as a signal.

In a few days I began to notice after each seizure a light residual sensitivity low on my left side — not an ache, rather a kind of flesh memory of contact, as after a handshake, or a pressure, not in itself unpleasant, like the thin sensation that you are still wearing your hat just after you have taken it off. Gradually, however, and almost in direct proportion to the subsidence of the cough, this pressure developed from increasingly less vague sensations into an intense and unbearable pain. I had the impression when I moved my hand inside my pants to touch the area that it actually glowed with a special localized heat. “I’m in trouble, I’m in trouble,” I groaned. Nor did it ease my fear when just two aspirin killed my pain. I’d been had. What, I thought, two aspirin? For this? For what I’ve got? I felt that my body was playing with me, teasing me into a phony confidence.

It was clear that something strange and bad had happened to me. My malaise, spontaneous as a sneeze, had been generated full-blown, complete, with no symptom less intense than any other. After a week it became apparent that whatever had struck me had done so with a peculiarly adaptive kind of cunning, with an almost biological sense of justice. By keeping careful track of what was happening to me I soon noticed that no two symptoms ever occurred simultaneously. It was as if what had been true of my life was true now of my chemistry — that not even my body was capable of doing two things at once. As the cough subsided the pain grew. As the pain subsided something else took its place and kept it only until some other threat presented itself. Those who live by the sword die by the sword.

There was something else. Besides this waxing and waning; this sweeping of my body’s circuits by progressive symptoms — a kind of vulgar, physical absurdity, almost like one of those garish movie marquees which operate according to some fixed mechanical cycle, one light popping on only after another has blinked off — there was a weird inconsequentialness to these tokens. The unproductive cough, the pain in the left side, too low to be connected with my heart, on the wrong side for appendicitis, bespoke a kind of triviality that belied the cruel realness of their presence. The other symptoms (I had accepted from the beginning that these were symptoms, that not even disease could present itself without a mask) seemed just as far-fetched, almost comic. For several days I seemed to be possessed in turn by all the basic drives. During one period I was always hungry, and no matter what or how much I ate I failed to satisfy myself. The hunger was as intense as the pain in my side had been — what one imagines starving men feel. In the next phase I was constantly cold; I had to get my winter sweaters and overcoat from our apartment and went out dressed as I might be in the depth of a cold winter, despite the unseasonable April heat. After that I felt an almost overwhelming sexuality. I brought magazines to my room on Fifty-eighth Street and pored lasciviously over the pictures of the girls, as susceptible as a pubescent boy to the silly accompanying text. Almost any casual contact with a woman — a clerk in a store, a girl beside me on a bus — was enough to set me off. Once, after staying up late writing my letters, I went to an all-night cafeteria for some coffee at about three A.M. A charwoman, middle- aged and fat, was on her hands and knees scrubbing the floor beside my table, and it was all I could do to stop myself from climbing on top of her.

Endlessly symptom followed symptom. My urine seemed thick. I was conscious of a hypersensitivity of my hair ends; it was torture to put a comb to my head. My hands fell asleep; my skin burned; my gums swelled. My heart tumbled heavily in my chest, like one casket loose in the hold of a ship.

My sleep during all this had never been so profound, yet I was as tired during the day as an insomniac. I awoke each morning to some new outrage, sudden, unanticipated, yet somehow already familiar, sadly certain and permanent as a doom. I might have been a city held in patient siege by wily, dangerous enemies. One morning I realized, with the queer rush of relief familiar to one who has at last learned some unpleasant rumor about himself, that I was going to die. I knew this. I was, simply, going to die. That’s what it would come to. I was incurable.

Much as I had thought of death I had given almost no thought at all to ill health. Now I perceived that death was a consequence of something that happened to your body, and this obvious truth struck me with a force that I would not have imagined. I understood that what I had thought of as oblivion, annihilation, was rooted in a bedrock of matter — that, as was now being demonstrated to me, a thousand things could go wrong, a million; that there were no guarantees that life would or needed or even wanted to go on; that whatever chemical experience meant when we said life was as consequential and in effect as accidental as the arrangement of fallen leaves on a lawn; that anything could happen; that one thin tissue bruised in a trip on the stairs could pollute others; that fatality was a chain reaction, death some ubiquitous thing on springs inside us, neither waiting nor ready to pounce, but set to go off at the merest untoward, uncircumspect jostle. I saw my body as something volatile as a bomb. Hypochondria was deep wisdom and ludicrous folly; there was nothing that we could do.

Thinking this — seeing myself not as someone who would one day die, but as one who was already dying, who even as he lived broke down whatever odds there were in his favor, who against his will recklessly used up his single provision, his small store of time — I began to feel a tremendous, almost heroic power. In the streets I sensed a strange, previously unknown force within me, as if I were in possession of some dread, terrible secret, which, were I to disclose it, would permanently affect the lives of others. Living, I was simply one among others; dying, I was above them, imprudent and colossal as some lame-duck hero. Although in one sense The Club had never seemed so important, it was irrelevant compared to this new thing. I saw again, but in a fresh, totally unexpected way, that I had not been prepared to die, that I had only been prepared to dread and hate death. While this was unchanged — while, indeed, I saw my death as the greatest of tragedies — my new reaction was neither tragic nor sad. Instead, I felt a weird giddiness, a strange lightness of heart and mind. I did not want to die, but the sense of rude power I experienced when I knew that I was dying was the most stimulating thing that had ever happened to me.

It was in this mood and to test this power that I began my series of death experiments.

Fully clothed I lay down on my bed. Placing my arms full length, unnaturally stiff, beside me, I arranged myself as in a coffin and closed my eyes. I tried to put all thought out of my mind, but the effort of keeping my body rigid produced a constant strain on my consciousness. It was unsatisfactory, and after a few minutes I gave it up; shockingly, whatever else it was, death was not uncomfortable.

I got on a Broadway bus. As inconspicuously as possible I slumped in my seat. I closed my eyes; I took small, imperceptible sips of breath; I stiffened; I allowed my body to pitch, as volitionlessly as a stone, with the momentum of the bus. In a few minutes someone sat down beside me. The rustle of a newspaper indicated that my seat mate was as yet unaware of me. Once the bus stopped abruptly and I fell stiffly against my companion; then we turned a corner and I was buffeted away from him, against the window. My feet shot out in compensation and I could feel our shoes touching. I could no longer hear the rustling of the newspaper, and I knew that whoever sat next to me was studying me. I could feel the power of my corpse slowly collecting, accumulating. The temptation to open my eyes was almost irresistible. Gradually the soft, random chatter of those around me began to subside. The silence pulled out behind me like a rug unrolling. Soon the only sound was the bus itself and the noises of traffic. Now I felt the full weight of everyone’s curiosity, the contagious, rubbery-necked swoosh of their attention, their startled, disturbed dread. They were like creatures arrested by some unaccustomed noise in a forest. I felt my death ooze out to them; I felt their almost adrenal response. It was as if some powerful taboo had been violated. I ached to stare back at them.

When the bus swung around another corner I collapsed ruthlessly against the person next to me. He gasped and recoiled as if struck by something profoundly unclean.

Someone rushed up. “Is he all right?” a voice said.

“I don’t know. I can’t tell,” said the man next to me, shoved now into a kind of action. He leaned forward and shook me cautiously.

I looked up at once. “What is it?” I said, a little angrily.

“I thought…” he stumbled. “We thought something was wrong. That you were sick. Dead.”

“I must have fallen asleep,” I said. “Is it Fourteenth Street yet?”

“Blocks back,” said the man who had come up the aisle.

The bus stopped and I got up quickly.

“Excuse me,” the man next to me said as I moved past him, “but you sleep like a dead man.”

“Excuse me,” I said, “but I need the practice.”

I went up on the roof of a ten-story building and climbed onto the ledge.

A crowd gathered and someone below ran off to get the police. I was too high to see their expressions, but I can imagine that they were seeing me as if I had been an ominous sky they scanned for warnings of a storm.

As I waved once and screamed and jumped backwards out of sight onto the tar and gravel rooftop, I could sense their shocked, massed inward suck of air. Never mind what you read about crowds at a motor race or a prizefight; people do not want people to die.

I took an elevator back down to the ground floor and went out into the streets to join the crowd.

“What’s happened?” I asked someone.

“Some guy was trying to kill himself. He fell backwards and probably knocked himself out. A cop’s gone up to get him.”

“They’ll put him away,” I said. “Suicide’s a serious crime.”

I went down into a subway station and boarded a train for the first time in my life. My hands cautiously in my lap, I sat on the wide wicker seat that ran along the length of the carriage and rode out to somewhere in Brooklyn. I got off the train, crossed the platform and got on another train going back. I sat next to a young girl about thirteen years old. She carried one of those little brass and plastic suitcases kids pack their leotards and ballet slippers in when they’re going for a lesson, and she was reading Mademoiselle. As the train tunneled under the river I pitched forward suddenly and groaned. I grabbed my chest and rocked it, frantic as a mother with a dead infant. I leaned heavily against the child. “Today’s the day,” I gasped, “a man died in your arms on the subway.”

On Fifth Avenue I saw a very well-dressed man carrying an expensive briefcase.

“Please,” I said, rushing up to him, “I’ve just swallowed cyanide. I was trying to kill myself but I’ve changed my mind.”

“Oh, my God,” the man said. “Oh, Jesus. Quick, let’s get a cab. Taxi,” he called. “Taxi! Here, take my arm. Taxi. God damn it, taxi. How much did you take? Where’s a hospital? The driver would know. Taxi! Taxi!” He waved his briefcase like a leather flag. “TAXI!” he screamed.

“In New York there must be fifty thousand cabs,” I said, “but do you think you can get one when you really need it?” I pulled away from him and disappeared around a corner.

I went up to the Bronx and walked around until I came to a park. I was wearing good clothes — I didn’t want anyone to think I was a bum sleeping one off. I found a deserted gravel path and stretched myself out face down across it. Soon I heard someone coming up the walk; from the squeaky crunchy sounds it must have been either a housemaid pushing a perambulator or a kid on a tricycle. Then I heard someone cooing as if to a child, and I knew that it was a housemaid. She didn’t see me until she was almost on top of me; then she screamed. I thought she would run away, but she came up to me and turned me over.

“Mister,” she called. “Mister. Please. Oh,” she yelled, turning away from me, “there’s been a murder. Help! Help!” Leaving the baby carriage, she ran off to get help.

When I could no longer hear her cries I rose, brushed myself off and walked away.

I was sitting in a cafeteria on Seventh Avenue when a woman came in leading an old man. She brought him to a table next to mine, pulled the chair out for him, and took his hand and guided it carefully to its wooden back. “It’s just behind you,” she said very softly.

The old man lowered himself tenderly into the seat as if he were tentatively sitting down in a tub of hot water. He might have been an old man at the beach, with his back to the waves, sitting in the sea.

The woman leaned over him. “What do you feel like having, Papa?” she asked gently.

“I think an egg salad sandwich,” he said. “Tomato soup. Do they have pie? Pie. Coffee.”

“I’ll bring it right back for you,” she said.

When she left him to go through the line, the blind man pulled himself closer to the table with great care. He put his hands out experimentally, feeling for the salt, the pepper, the bottles of ketchup and mustard and sugar. He frowned as if he might have forgotten to tell the woman something, and then sighed resignedly. I had the impression that his blindness was fairly recent. He took off his hat and set it down too close to the edge of the table. In one of his clumsy motions of orientation he brushed it off and it fell to the floor.,

The woman came back with the food and set it down in front of him. She picked up the hat and put it back on the table without saying anything. “Do you think you’ll be all right?” she asked as she hovered over him. “I have to see Sybil before she leaves the office.”

“I’ll be fine,” he said. “What am I, an old blind man?”

She put a tablespoon in his hand and moved the soup in front of him. “I won’t be long,” she said. “Her office is in this block.”

“I’ll be fine,” he said.

“Well then, twenty minutes.” She took a cigar out of her purse and put it in his breast pocket. “There’s a cigar for you when you’re through.”

When she had been gone for about five minutes I looked hastily around the cafeteria. We were almost alone. I waited for another minute and then leaned toward the old man and slammed a chair down violently. The blind man was startled and turned his head uselessly toward the sound. I bent down quickly beside him at a level with his stomach and grunted twice. I stamped my heels clumsily on the tile floor.

“Is anything wrong?” the old man asked. “Is anything wrong? Ruth?” A little tomato soup had spilled from the spoon in his shaking hand onto his vest.

I drew back soundlessly as the old man called again. When there was no answer he shook his head and scowled in frustration. He pushed the soup away from him, splashing some onto his sandwich, where it soaked into the bread like blood. He fumbled for the sandwich, found it, and pulled it without appetite toward his mouth. I waited until he had finished half of it and then rose from my seat quietly and went around behind his chair. “I’m a detective,” I said.

“My credentials.”

“What is it?” he asked nervously.

“It’s none of my business, of course, but I don’t see how you can just go on eating. Well, maybe you’re used to it. Fourteen years on the force and I’m not.” I turned away for a moment and lowered my voice. “Better call the morgue, Harry. This is their baby.”

“What is it?” the old man said again.

“I’ll have to ask you a few questions,” I said. “You’re our only witness.” “What is it?”

“Did it seem to you that the deceased acted peculiar in any way? I mean, did the deceased do anything that may have looked funny to you?”

“Is someone dead?” he asked, frightened. “I don’t see,” he said. “I heard a noise. What was it?”

“You’re blind?”

“Yes. Yes. Who is it? Is it a woman?”

I hesitated. “No,” I said finally. “A man. About thirty-three, thirty-four. A big fellow, strongly built.”

“Oh, that’s terrible,” the old man said. “That’s terrible.”

“That his wallet, Harry? Yeah, give it to me. Let’s see who he was.”

“That’s terrible,” the old man said softly. He realized suddenly that he was still holding his sandwich, and he dropped it as though it were something foul.

“Boswell,” I said. “His name was James Boswell.”

“Oh, what a terrible thing,” the man said. “A young man. That’s a very awful thing.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

He said my name to himself over and over again, as though he were trying to imagine from the sound of it what its owner could have been like.

“Well—” I said.

“It was kind of you to try to do something for him,” the old man said.

“That’s my job.”

“Is he from here?” he asked.

“What?”

“Is he from this city?”

“No,” I said harshly. “He’s from out of town. From somewhere else. He’s a foreigner.”

“It’s a terrible thing,” the old man said. “Maybe he was on holiday. On business.”

“A tourist,” I said.

“Poor man,” he said. “I wish I had had my sight. Maybe he gave a signal… I might have helped.”

“No,” I said. “Nobody could have done anything.”

Oh, what a thing it is to be settled by our past — to be no better, finally, than our toilet training, than domestic arrangements we don’t even understand at the time. The symptoms for the day are a virulent disgust, advanced abhorrence, endemic loathing, mortal detestation, inoperable repugnance.

He died such a healthy fella, and everybody—everybody—was very kind.

VII

At first the doorman did not recognize me. He moved with a faint threatening motion to block my way and slipped his whistle out of his breast pocket.

“What’s the matter with you?” I said. “I live here.” The doorman stared. “Oh, excuse me, sir,” he said at last. “I didn’t know you. Your clothes… Are you feeling all right sir?”

“I’m sick. I’m having a little trouble with my breathing. With my heart. All my glands are oozing.” “I’ll help you up to your apartment,” he said. “No.” The whistle was still in his hand. “Just pipe me aboard,” I said. The doorman held the door for me and I moved through it almost drunkenly. A woman coming out as I entered looked at me curiously.

“We’re taking over,” I said. “The neighborhood’s changing.” I backed into the elevator giggling.

For a moment I couldn’t remember my floor. I pressed the button and felt the elevator lift me by pushing at my shoes and had an impression, brief but terrifying, that it would move me upwards through the roof, the clouds, space, past the stars.

I stumbled out at my floor, but when I felt in my pockets for the key I did not have it. I could not remember now if I had ever had a key to the apartment. When I rang the bell the chimes inside (Gift-of-the-Month Club) sounded a fragment from some hymn. There were no other sounds. I pressed the bell again; I knocked on the door. It hurt my fists to tap even lightly upon it and I stopped a man walking down the hall toward the elevator.

“Excuse me, neighbor, but I am neurasthenic and it is acute agony for me to rap upon this door. I wonder if you would do it for me.”

“Why don’t you ring the bell?”

“I have, sir. No one comes.”

“Then it won’t do you any good to knock on the door, will it?” the man said, and continued down the hall.

I looked helplessly at the door and taking the knob in my hands began to shake it. “Open up,” I yelled. “Make my bed soon, Mother, for I am sick to the heart and fain would lie down.”

I moved on to the next apartment and pressed the buzzer. A woman I did not recognize opened the door almost immediately. I had not shaved for several days and now, a huge reprobate presence in old clothes, I stood leaning clumsily against her doorway. She gasped and tried to shut the door.

“Just a minute.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “The lady of the house is not at home.”

I put my arm on the closing door and pushed against it with all my remaining strength. “All right,” I said, shoving a finger into my pocket and pointing it as her as if it were a gun, “this is a stickup.”

The woman stepped back, “What do you want?”

“Is that the kitchen?” I asked in a low voice, jerking my head around to the right.

“Yes,” she answered weakly.

“Then you better gimme — gimme — gimme a glass of milk!” I laughed. “No. I live next door. I forgot my key and no one’s home. I’m sick. Get the doorman. He’s got a passkey. Call him, lady — please.”

She didn’t move.

“I’m James Boswell,” I said. “From next door. I’m in the book. Look, in time to come we’ll laugh about this. See, it was just my finger. I fooled you.” I saw the speaking tube on the wall just inside the door. “May I?” I asked, already pressing the button. I put my lips next to the mouthpiece, receiving it as I would a kiss. “Who’s there? Who’s there? Operator! Operator!”

“You’ve got your finger on the button,” the woman said.

I took it away and a voice, tinny as the sound of a ventriloquist’s dummy, came out of the small speaker. “Yes?”

“It’s Boswell. Get up here. I’m with the good woman next door. I’ve got no key, no one’s home. I’m sick. Hurry! Hurry!”

In a few minutes the doorman had let me into the apartment.

“It’s disgraceful,” I said. “Having to be let into my own place like this. Humiliating.”

“Do you want me to call a doctor, sir?”

“Get Dr. Green,” I said. “On Twelfth Street. Old family physician. Knows me inside out, upside down. Get him. I want Green. Call Green.”

“Yes, sir.” The doorman started to leave.

“Where’s my wife?”

“I haven’t seen Mrs. Boswell, sir.”

“The kid — David.”

“I haven’t seen him either, sir.”

“Fine way to treat a dying man.”

The doorman left. The woman in whose doorway I had stood now stood in mine. “Is there something I can do?” she asked.

“The lady of the house is not at home,” I said. I went into our bedroom and lay down. “Close the goddamn hall door,” I shouted. “There’s a draft.”

The door slammed.

“Snug as a bug in a rug,” I said. “Spry as a fly in an eye.” I rolled over, scraping my shoes across the satin bedspread. “Oh, Jesus,” I said, “what a way to die.” I placed my hand gently on my heart. “Help,” I said very softly. I made a song out of it, singing “Help Help Help Help Help Help Help Help” as if they were notes in the scale.

I closed my eyes and fell asleep and when I opened them Dr. Green was standing over my bed watching me.

“What interesting things do you keep in your bag, Doctor?” I asked, looking at his satchel.

“I’m a scientist,” the doctor said. “I don’t make house calls. You sick?”

“Oh Jesus, what a way to die.”

“What is it with you? You sick? What did you call me for? Where’s your wife? I brought a little stuff with me on dry ice. Even so, you can’t keep it too long. It melts like ice cream.” He leaned down over me. “Say,” he said, “I won’t crap you. I know how particular you are. Guess who I got in the syringe.”

“O Jesus, did I call for you?”

“Where’s your wife? What is this? The guy called and said it was an emergency. I don’t make house calls, but I remembered you and I looked upon it as a professional challenge. Jesus, the way you messed my place up!”

“Are you really a doctor? What’s wrong with me?”

“I’m very impressed,” Dr. Green said. “Your footman brought me up and let me in. This is a nice place. I like to see the stuff gets a good home.” He tapped the bag. “I’m not at liberty to disclose names,” he said, “but I got a cabinet minister in here. A president. A king!”

“Help Help Help Help Help Help Help Help,” I sang down the scale.

“Come on, where is she?”

“It’s a mistake. Go away.”

“What do you mean a mistake? I don’t make house calls. What do you mean a mistake?”

“Please,” I said. “Please. If you’re a doctor you must have taken an oath to help the sick. Go away.”

“Seventy-five bucks,” the doctor said.

“Bill me,” I yelled at him. The shout raised devils in my chest.

“Well, make up your mind, will you?” Dr. Green said.

“Get out. Now. Get out!” I moved to get up and the doctor backed out quickly.

“Frail as a snail in a pail,” I said when I was alone again. I felt very cold and I got up to pull back the spread. It was April and there was only one thin blanket on the bed. I went to the closet to look for others but couldn’t find any. At the back of the closet, high on a shelf, was a box under some suitcases where some blankets might be, but I hadn’t the strength to move the suitcases. I pulled some of Margaret’s and my clothes off the rod and staggered with them back to bed. I arranged the blanket and bedspread and clothes on top of me, but when I tried to sleep again I was conscious of the smell of cleaning fluid on the clothes. This grew stronger until it filled my nostrils, my head, my throat. At last I could stand it no longer; I knew I was going to vomit, and I tried to push back the heavy clothing. But the weight was enormous, and I threw up on the bed.

I shuddered. “I’m sick. I’m really sick.” At first this seemed genuinely strange to me, but as I thought about it I began to cherish it as a justification. It was as if this one sickness, this one real thing in my life — the smell of the vomit, the quick, cold ache that floated transitionlessly through my body as something blown by the wind — were all that I needed to underwrite my behavior. My body, frailer now than it had ever been, was my credential, my card of identity, my alibi. At last I had a legitimate need. It filled me up; for the first time in my life I began to feel outrage, the ferocious satisfaction of the injured, the framed, the damned. The feeling was at once unfamiliar and conventional, as exquisite as the slaking of a thirst.

Where were Margaret and David? Their absence was only what I should have expected, perhaps, but somehow I hadn’t expected it. Margaret’s insistence that she loved me had been true enough, but no train waited forever. What I might have loved was the train that did. And I understood, too, the David whose pleasure in me derived from a kind of humility used as keenly as a weapon.

Their hatred of me now — that was what their absence must mean — was wrong. What I had suspected about myself never seemed so true. In a way, my hands were as clean as many men’s, cleaner than most men’s. I had done nothing to foster death, nothing to encourage it. Though I had never loved anyone, neither had I hated. I was a genuinely amiable man who recognized something clear, who believed from the first what others were afraid to believe — that it was the nature of love to be forever misplaced. Love was the country bumpkin of virtues. All I had ever wanted was to five forever, without pain.

I was terrified. Now my body was my enemy. If I, like other men, had not escaped pain, at least my pains had seemed — even as I suffered them, when the imagination and the foresight were most dulled — explicable, temporary, almost secular. This was something else, different in kind. My body was pitted, gutted, oozing the fumes of decay. I was on fire.

Where were Margaret and David? I was square with them both now. If their desertion was hard for me it wasn’t because of love, but because they might have done something, fetched a bedpan, changed my linen, brought me drugs. Well, it was true. One’s chickens went away to roost.

I tried to think about it rationally. That Margaret had not taken her clothes meant nothing. She was a Principessa — money was no object. I thought bitterly of how I had failed to scold her for this. For then the presence of her clothes might have meant something; I could imagine her leaving them behind as a gesture. She could be back in Italy now, arranging with the Black Pope himself a decree, a special dispensation. Fixing beyond fixing. People could not make other people happy, I thought, and love was no debt. Yet my wife and son, with their moral U.O.Me’s, would never understand this. They had meant to bring me down with guilt, tirelessly focusing their unspoken accusations like children flashing the sun in your eyes with a hand mirror. Screw guilt. Men died. It was physics, not metaphysics.

I hauled myself out of bed, the vomit suspended in slimy strings from my mouth, and went to the bathroom. It might kill me to shower now, but I couldn’t stand my stink. I undressed clumsily and stood, weaving and ridiculous, before the full-length mirror. I turned on the shower taps full blast; the water felt like heavy knives. Drying myself, I remembered how I had felt fifteen years before in the gymnasium — powerful, and despite my size, almost light. David could beat me now.

I didn’t want to go back into our bedroom; instead I staggered into David’s room and lay on the narrow bed. Margaret had decorated the room. There was simply no sign of him; it might have been a room in a hotel. What it must have cost David, I thought, to have suppressed his sense of beauty, the single coruscation of personality he had allowed himself. How vindictive he was really; how, angry he was. Then I thought, I am a man rankled by human waste, put off by the deflection of self as other men are by high treason. I wondered that David could have misunderstood so much.

I looked sadly out at the dusk gathering like a fog on the windows and fell fitfully into a doze. In my sleep— which was not free of pain — I had the impression that I was being moved through time, past landmarks of evening and night and morning and afternoon, leaving time behind as one left behind the farmhouses one saw through the window of a moving train. But when I woke the dusk was the shade I had remembered it and I wondered whether I had slept at all. I thought I should be hungry; I tried to remember when I had last eaten. It was in the cafeteria when I had pointlessly humiliated the blind man. That was at least two days before, or, if I had slept around the clock, three. I had spent a day in my room on Fifty-eighth Street, and there had suffered the attack.

What a fool, I thought. It was the business of my life to keep on living. I was getting no treatment, no medicines. If what had happened to me was, as I suspected, a heart attack, I wondered why I had not called a doctor earlier, why I had given Green’s name when the doorman asked me if I needed help. The pains were still with me and I wondered what the world’s record was for a heart attack.

I picked up the phone beside David’s bed, but when the girl at the desk asked what number I wanted I realized that I knew no number, that though I could give her the unlisted phone numbers of half the celebrities in New York, I didn’t even know the name of a good doctor.

“Get me the doorman.”

“Roger?”

“Yes. Please. Get me Roger.”

The operator connected me.

“Roger, this is Mr. Boswell.”

“Yes, sir. Feeling better, sir?”

“Not so you’d notice, Roger.”

“That’s too bad, sir.”

“Roger, I need a good doctor. Who do the tenants use?”

“That would be Dr. Mefwiss, sir.”

“Is he a good man, Roger?”

“Yes, sir. He’s a very big man.”

“Far?”

“No, sir, he’s right in this building.”

“Well, would you see that he comes up here, Roger?”

“Dr. Mefwiss doesn’t like to make house calls, sir.”

“Goddamn it, Roger, it’s his own house. I’m too sick to move. Who knows what it’s costing me just to speak to you on the telephone? Get Dr. Mefwiss. Get him. I want Mefwiss.”

“I’ll get him, sir. I’ll get him right away.”

“Yes,” I said. “Oh, Roger? When did you let me in?”

“Yes, sir, that’s right.”

“No, no. When? When did I come home?”

“That would be this morning, sir.”

“Oh,” I said, “only this morning.” I was disappointed that I had not slept around the clock. Was it possible that Margaret and David were just out for the day?

“Thank you, Roger.”

“I’ll get Dr. Mefwiss, sir.”

“Yes. Thank you.”

When I put down the phone I thought of something else Roger might do for me and I picked it up again. “What’s Roger’s extension?” I asked the operator. “I might be needing it.”

She rang, but there was no answer. Roger must have gone for Dr. Mefwiss. “Just let it ring,” I told the girl.

In a few minutes Roger answered.

“What did Dr. Mefwiss say, Roger?”

“Is that you, Mr. Boswell? He said he’d come right up, sir.”

“Fine,” I said. “Thank you, Roger. You may just have saved my life.”

“You’re not to worry, sir. You’ll be all right.”

“Thank you, Roger. Nice of you to say so. Roger, I want you to go to the desk and find out if my rent’s been paid for next month.”

“Your rent, sir?”

“It’s after the twenty-fifth, isn’t it?”

“It’s the twenty-seventh, sir.”

“Our rent is due on the twenty-fifth,” I said. “My wife usually takes care of it. Look, Roger, I’ll level with you. I’m trying to figure out if my wife has left me. I can’t call the desk myself — they’d get too suspicious. I haven’t got a dime of my own, you know. She’s the Principessa, you understand. I didn’t marry her for her money exactly, but let’s not kid ourselves, she pays the bills. You see, if she hasn’t paid up that could mean she doesn’t intend to come back. If the desk found that out they’d try to evict me. I’m in a tough spot — if I’m as sick as I think, I might have to use this place for a while.”

“I see,” Roger said, astonished.

“I thought you might help me.” I lowered my voice. “I haven’t got a dime. I’m this — you know — stud.”

“Really?”

“Oh, sure,” I said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if that wasn’t why I was sick now. The demands that women made! Anyway, I thought you might help me. You won’t make a nickel out of it, but you wouldn’t have to call me Mister Boswell.”

“I see,” Roger said.

“We’d be in it together. You and me against the syndicate that runs this place.” There was a pause as Roger thought about this. “I could tell you stories about those guys that would curl your ears. Tie-ups with gangsters, the fire chief, the unions. Fixing beyond fixing. Deals in flawed cement, watered steel. Stand clear of the building, Roger, when you blow your whistle for a cab.”

“Really, sir?”

“Jim.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You said ‘Really, sir?’ Call me Jim.”

“Jim,” Roger said experimentally.

“A deal’s a deal,” I said. “Look, someone’s at the door. Probably that doctor. Find out about the rent.”

I shouted that I was alone and too sick to move and told the doctor to go down to the desk for a passkey. In a few minutes he returned and let himself in. I told him about my symptoms in detail, explaining about the cough that brought nothing up and the pain in my side and the hunger and the flashes of prurience and the thickness of my urine and the hypersensitivity of my hair ends and finally about the pains I had been having in my chest for the past two days. I tried to tell him about this sense I had of moving through time, but by then the doctor had placed his stethoscope to my chest and was listening to my heart. I waited impatiently for him to finish and then told him again about my disoriented sense of time.

“Hmn,” he said, “Angst. Classical.”

Hmn, I thought. Angst. Popular.

“Frankly, Mr. Boswell, I find nothing the matter, with you,” the doctor said. He was one of those men who, thirty years after the fact, still have the air about them of the Middle-European refugee. “Your heart seems quite sound,” he added.

Dr. Mefwiss told me that examinations in the home were by their very nature superficial and that if the pains did not go away then by all means I must come in for additional tests, but that in the meanwhile he didn’t think there was much to worry about, that I seemed to him somewhat tired and that these symptoms might very well be my body’s way of warning me that it was time to slow down. Here was an opportunity to get some rest, he said, and that if I thought it would help he could leave me some prescriptions for that purpose — tranquilizers, a mild sleeping pill, something for my pain.

“Leave them with the doorman,” I said.

“Yes,” Dr. Mefwiss said. He snapped his case shut and stood up.

“I threw up,” I told him hopefully.

Dr. Mefwiss shrugged.

“Well, thank you very much, Doctor. You can let yourself out, I think, and please don’t forget to return that passkey to the desk.”

When he left I picked up the telephone. “Roger? Jim.”

“Yes, Jim,” Roger said. “How did it go?”

“Ήe doesn’t think I ought to be moved at this time, so he’s not hospitalizing me just now, Roger. He’ll give you some prescriptions for me, I’d like you get them filled right away.”

“Yes, of course,” Roger said worriedly.

“What about the rent?” I asked.

Roger hesitated.

“Come on, what happened?”

“She didn’t pay it, Jim.”

“Ah.”

“Maybe she just forgot.”

“Mind like a trap, Roger. Seven languages. Photographic memory.”

“Well, it’s only two days late. The office didn’t think anything of it.”

“The doctor said I had to rest,” I said wearily. “It’s tiring me to talk.”

“I understand,” Roger said.

“Get the prescriptions filled,” I said. I replaced the phone and then called him back immediately.

“Roger? There’s something else. That doctor… I don’t know. Ask around; something may be fishy. See what you can find out. I don’t have to tell you to be discreet.” I hung up.

Lying there, I had the sense that something which I had not wanted to happen was already beginning. At last I knew what it was. At any time during the past fifteen years someone could have asked me, “What’s troubling you, Boswell?” and I could have answered, “The three- hundred-pound bench press,” “John Sallow,” “A contact in New York,” “The Great,” “The Club,” “Death.” My life had been without real complexity. It had had the classic simplicity of an obstacle course, the routine excitement of anticipated emergencies. I had lived peculiarly untouched by what men call fate, and if I had sometimes missed complexity I had usually been able to see it as a proliferation of passions, something I was unqualified for. If I had ever regarded myself sentimentally, it was as a kind of hero manqué. No one could long grieve for what one was unsuited for by condition and will. No one could cry over unpoured milk. I lived untouched by fate still, but the other thing — complexity — was being gradually forced upon me, and only now was it clear that what I called “complexity” was not so much a proliferation of passions as a diminishment of them, a chipping away at whatever passion one could call his own. It was indeed a heart attack I had suffered, no matter what the doctor said. Real life, if not knowing where one stood were real life, was simply a question of subterranean manipulations, of contrivings, a robbing of Peter to pay Paul. The great thing was to be obsessed, to maintain one’s certainty, to be able to know arrogantly.

Something had gone wrong. Still, I knew that if I had been betrayed it had been by my own hand; the doctor had as much as told me so. If the symptoms I felt, the disturbances of my peace like the violences of terrorists, were psychosomatic, as the doctor had more than hinted, then it could only mean that I had mislived my life, that all the time I had thought I was doing otherwise I had been working overtly against my own silent nature. At my age this was unthinkable; that only now my nature, whatever oriental a thing it might turn out to be, was taking its revenge, was outrageous. It was like being damned without warning, like being condemned to Hell because one was an ignorant pagan. Why didn’t you tell me, I felt like demanding of my nature. Why were you so silent, so demurring all these years? Evading with no comment and sometimes even with approval all those things you privately condemned? You were my God, I thought, I had no other. Why didn’t you love me?

Now it was simply too late; I would not reform. This was the record for a heart attack and there was no cure. I would have to sing the tune the way I had learned it. If one of us had to give in, it would have to be my nature, my self-righteously taciturn and conspiratorial true self. Had ever a true self been less true?

If I had no genuine disease now, why, one day I would. One day I could bring the doctors a real cancer, a recognizably diseased heart. I warned my pain that I could live with it, my nature that although I would never understand its treachery, I could live with it as well. My pain had confused me, but now that I knew the awful thing it stood for I could resist it. In three days, I told myself, I would be better. I closed my eyes and slept better than I had in days.

The phone rang. “It’s Roger. Did you get the medicine? I let myself in and put it by your bed. You were sleeping.”

“Yes, Roger. I see it. Thank you.”

“You know,” he said, “you were right.”

“Was I?” I asked sleepily.

“You certainly were. I can’t say very much about it now, but it looks as though you were right about him.”

“Was I? About whom?”

“That doctor — Mefwiss. I asked the doorman at Number 36. Mefwiss used to have his office there. He’s mixed up in some stuff. There’s talk of a malpractice suit over his head in another state.”

“Fixing beyond fixing.”

“He sure fooled me,” Roger said. “All his talk about a virus going round, cigarettes and cancer, men with heart conditions leading normal lives — just a front.”

“Fixing beyond fixing.”

“You really spotted that guy.”

“Fixing beyond fixing. Thank you, Roger.”

I leaned back. The pains in my chest were just as severe as ever, but I was untroubled. Roger had helped me. Another doorman in my life, I thought, another gatekeeper. There was something Elizabethan about it. The old democracy between king and fool. But I knew pleasantly that if I were inside the walls now it was in body only — not spirit, thank you. There was still something in myself reprobate and unreconstructed. If it was not, as I had just learned, my soul, then it was something better than my soul — my will perhaps, the glands of my need. Fixing beyond fixing, even within myself. Here I was in civil but civilized war with my own nature, the two factions outwardly like gentlemen who still behaved courteously toward one another, but deeper and more importantly, wheelers and dealers who cynically kept the trade routes open.

Later I called Roger and asked him to bring the newspapers.

“Which ones?”

“What difference does it make? Fixing beyond fixing, eh, Roger? Scratch a hero and what have you got left?”

“Nothing,” Roger said.

“Right. Men are hollow. It’s easier to keep the trade routes open that way.”

“You can’t trust anybody,” Roger said.

“The truth shall make you free,” I said.

“So long as it doesn’t make too free with you, eh, Jim?”

“Jackanapes!” I roared when I replaced the phone. “Man in motley! Clown!”

I wondered where Margaret was.

Toward evening the telephone in our room rang (to make David feel more at home we had given him his own telephone) and I got out of bed to answer it. It could have been Margaret. People rarely called us; mostly we used the phone to call each other. When I picked up the receiver the person on the other end of the line listened to my voice without answering. “Margaret?” I said. “Is that you? I’m a sick man, Margaret. What have you been doing with yourself, kid?” I hung up.

Back in David’s room it occurred to me to call my son. I dialed the Fifth Avenue salon where David worked. “May I speak with Mr. David, please?”

“Who is this, please?”

I experimented. “A friend. He’ll know.”

“Mr. David is very busy.

“Bitch,” I said.

“Look, if this is the party that’s been bothering him, he’s asked me to tell you that he’s very upset and that you’re not to call any more.”

“Get him. It’s his father. Get him,” I shouted

David came to the phone. I could imagine its being thrust into his hand and him taking it as though it were a microphone into which he was expected to sing while people fled a burning theater. He would be turning his head now, looking around him with that special, sly confusion he affected. “Yes?” he said uncertainly.

“David, it’s Papa.”

“Oh,” David said. “Oh. How are you?”

“Why do you spite me, David?”

“Is something wrong? I’m sorry, is something wrong?”

“Forget about it, David. Cut your losses and try to live. Where are you?”

“I’m working.”

“Where are you? I’m home for a few days. I haven’t seen you.”

“Oh,” David said. I knew what he was going to say next and when he actually said it there was nothing more I could do for him. “You were gone so much,” David said, “I thought it might be because of me. I didn’t want to put you to any trouble. That’s why I left.” Then he added, “I’m in the Village — with a friend.”

“Look, Telemachus, you’ll never catch me. Give it up. Do something you’re good at. I didn’t know it was going to be you when I screwed your mother. Forget about it. Look at it this way, what happens when I die? You’ll just be left holding your lousy bag of spite.”

David didn’t answer. I sighed. “Where’s Margaret?” I asked finally.

“Isn’t she with you?” he asked happily.

“You’re a rotten kid, sonny. I disinherit you for the second and last time. Goodbye.”

That was the way to do it, I thought. The cutting of one’s losses was an art form. I had never allowed David to drain much of my spirit, but it was useless to pretend he hadn’t gotten something. He wasn’t entitled to it, but what he got away with he got away with. Already I felt a little stronger.

I called Roger and asked him to pick up some things for me in the room on Fifty-eighth Street. I had been neglecting The Club. The strength I had won back from David I would put into the arrangements that had still to be made.

Now that was the way to live, I thought. Simply. Why, the world was a Walden if you knew how to look at it. Madness and method were the strengths of the true champion. For the first time in many days I forced myself to think of the great. For the first time in my life I allowed myself to say “we.”

VIII

April 30, 1962. New York City.

I dreamt of The Club.

I had a new symptom: I could see only in lurid shades of red. It was not unpleasant, and I strolled about the room almost merrily, making sure that everyone was happy and had what he wanted. I had never been so content. I had the comfortable sense that all time was before us, that it had been frozen forever at Saturday night.

I was the Host. “Oh, Boswell can be the Host,” people called when I walked in, and the Queen ran up and slipped the mantle of Host around my neck. “The amiable man,” she said.

“I am not genuinely fond of people,” I replied modestly and they all applauded. “As you were,” I said, and they returned to their conversations.

I continued my tour of the room, the merry old uncle of Scrooge’s early Christmases, long hose over my plump, pinkish, hairless calves, fat as jolly roasts. They had dressed me in silks, and I walked among them wide- behinded, hearty as a father of the bride, moving people under the mistletoe, proposing toasts, drinking all men’s healths, shoving money into the fiddler’s hands. People smiled at me and begged me to stay, but I remembered my obligations and shook my head. Frequently I wrote out checks and folded them into their parting handshakes.

Nate’s was as lush as a tropic. Now that I was an intimate of the place, it struck me as it never had when I was an outsider. My dancing slippers glided silkenly over the soft fur carpets. The linen, thick as blankets on the tables, looked like the cloths that set off precious stones in jeweler’s trays; indeed, I could just perceive the repressed gleam of gold and silver beneath the rosy haze of the cutlery. The knives and forks and goblets and dishes seemed expensive precision tools, like the studded, complicated brass of band instruments.

As I walked about the room, nodding happily to the lovely women, the handsome men, sound as athletes in their evening dress, I had a vision. Through the windows of Nate’s Place, past the crowds outside, I could see the Times Building, and moving across the dream-restored electric-bulbed banner in letters of fire: SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST. Of course, I thought. It was good to know. I remembered films I had seen where the end of the world was portrayed. The Bomb had fallen and the survivors were always a cross section, a tiny representative handful of men, cozy as people in an elevator together — a laborer, a businessman, a young officer, an old lady, a Negro, an ingénue, a bum. But it wouldn’t be like that at all — it would be like this. The last men and women on earth would be in evening clothes, as we were. We were vulnerable, perhaps, but we were less vulnerable. I began to congratulate the people around me as I greeted them, to love them for their safety. We were like finalists in some cosmic beauty contest — mutually gorgeous.

I felt a new elation, a new freedom, and I moved now with that special, just controlled wildness of the exceptionally happy. I became more interested in what people were saying, realizing just in time that it would be important. I didn’t want to miss any of it, but I saw that I couldn’t be everywhere at once. Had it not seemed ungracious I would have demanded the silence of all groups until I could join them. Things were being said, I knew, that I was missing — intimate shop talk of the Great, as sweet to me as the songs and voices of the Sirens. Two hundred was too unwieldy a number, I realized, and I had a sense of imperfection like the awareness of a stain on my trousers. It was no longer enough simply to live forever. It was no longer enough to be just one single man. I wanted to be everyone in this room and all the people in the crowds outside and all people everywhere who had ever lived. What did it mean to be just Boswell, to have only Boswell’s experience?

I walked faster. Soon I was running around the room from group to group, but I saw that this was no better and I resumed my normal pace, a long, impatient stalk like an angry cat’s.

At one table where Morty Perlmutter and Dr. Green, the noted gynecologist, were among the group, I made up my mind to stop. “Gentlemen,” I said, nodding to both. I sat down and a famous senator handed me a drink. I did not know the senator personally and Dr. Green introduced him to me as his son. Gordon Rail, the communications tycoon, whispered in my ear. “Our next President,” he said. “The man to watch. He has the support of all seven hundred and forty-three of my morning newspapers and of five of my TV and radio networks. Three hundred and twelve of my evening papers will say they’re against him, but that’s only to make it look good, you understand.”

“Fixing beyond fixing,” I said.

“What did you expect?” he asked.

“Dr. Green was just telling us something very interesting when you stopped by, Boswell,” Morty Perlmutter said. I glanced at Dr. Green, who seemed a little uneasy.

“Go on, Doctor,” I said.

“Well, it’s not really very much.”

“No, no, please go on,” I said. “I shall feel I’m intruding otherwise.”

“It’s just something about the Profession,” he said.

“Yes?” I said, waiting.

“Well, it’s rather personal, when you come right down to it.”

“Yes?”

“Well,” he said at last, “you know how we gynecologists are supposed to be able to look on the female anatomy just as if it were some kind of machine?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it’s just that I never could.”

“I see.”

“I get nervous,” he explained. “It’s damned hard to have to examine some of these girls. It drives me crazy.”

“I should have thought you’d be used to it by this time, Green,” Gordon Rail said.

“Not at all,” Morty said. “It’s our culture. It’s only where the weaving trade flourishes that you have prurience. Paris and Rome and New York are world centers of the garment industry. That’s why there’s so much emphasis on sex in those cities.”

“I never realized that,” the senator said.

“Well, of course,” Morty said. “Why do you think my tribes are so underpopulated? Where you have nakedness you don’t have much of your copulation.”

“That would suggest an interesting new interpretation of the Fall,” the Black Pope said.

“To this day I can enjoy making love to my wife only if she has a sheet over her head,” Dr. Green said glumly. His son the senator looked down shyly. “Once she almost smothered,” Dr. Green said.

“On the Isle of Pica the unmarried virgins all go around nude except for this bandage on their left knee,” Morty Perlmutter said. “It used to madden me to think about what was under that bandage. I mean, for God’s sake, I had the example of the right knee, but it didn’t make any difference.”

“It embarrasses me even to look at the equipment,” Dr. Green said. ‘“I’m a fetishist about gynecological supplies. I talk this way only because we’re behind closed doors.” He lowered his voice. “It’s good to be able to get it off my chest, but I don’t really deserve to be among you men at all.”

The other men demurred politely. “We’re all of of us corrupt, Green,” Gordon Rail said with kindness.

“Have any of you boys ever had a tube of vaginal jelly in your hands?” Dr. Green asked ardently.

“What do you think about the dissemination of birth- control information, Green?” Gordon Rail asked. “As a newspaperman I’d like to know.”

“Well, it’s good for business, of course,” Dr. Green said. “Excuse me, Your Reverence,” he said to the Black Pope. “Say,” he said to the rest of us, “how would you fellows like to hear an amusing story? Of course it’s off the record.”

“Well, of course,” Morty said.

“Naturally,” Gordon Rail said. He looked at the rest of us and we all agreed.

“It goes back to the day when I finished my internship. There was this guy I had gone through med school with, another gynecologist. A stiff bastard — he never saw the humor in what we were doing. Nothing ever bothered him. He was made out of stone, I think.”

“The Party Whip is like that,” the senator said.

“Really?” Gordon Rail said.

“Oh yes,” the senator said. “Thinks he’s a regular goddamn Thomas Jefferson. I never saw anyone like him for passing laws. No sense of humor at all.”

“When we finished our internship we both set up practices in the same city. Any of you boys ever see a gynecologist’s office?” Dr. Green asked.

“I have,” Morty said. “I’ve seen everything.”

“Then you know there are a lot of screens around, and sheets and special tables. We have to make it as impersonal as we can. We deal only with the specific thing, you see. Like a bank teller who only gets to know a depositor’s hand as he pushes the passbook under the cage.

“So anyway, this time I’m talking about I had a date to have dinner with my friend and I went over to pick him up at his office. He told me he’d be all through, but there was still one woman waiting to see him when I got there. Well, she must have been very nervous because when my friend came out and indicated that he was ready for her, and said to me, ‘Hello there, Green, I have one more appointment,’ and went back into his office, this woman just got up and went out the door. I looked at her, but she was tongue-tied with embarrassment — this happens sometimes — and just got the hell out of there as fast as she could. So I went on in to pick up my friend and tell him he’d just lost his patient, but his back was to me and he was stooped over examining some records. Before I could even open my mouth he said, ‘Go behind the screen and get undressed, Mrs. Davis.’ Well, when I saw all this equipment and everything, I figured here was a good chance to shake this bastard up for once, so I went back there and took off all my clothes. All the time he kept talking to me and reassuring me. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘when you’re ready, what I want to establish in this preliminary examination is your general condition. Just get on the table, please, and cover everything but your legs with the sheet.’ So I did. I got on the table and pulled the sheet over my head, and this guy asked me if I was ready, and I grunted, and he started around behind the screen. ‘I just want to see what your trouble is, Mrs. Davis,’ he says. ‘Oh my God,’ he says, ‘Mrs. Davis!’”

“Say, that’s very amusing,” Gordon Rail said.

“A little irresponsible, I think,” the Black Pope said.

“Well, isn’t that exactly what’s so amusing about it?” I asked.

“Gordon Rail’s right,” the senator said. “We’re all corrupt.”

“Of course it wouldn’t do for them to find out,” Gordon Rail said. He pointed to the crowds still gathering outside the window.

“We’re behind closed doors,” Dr. Green said.

“Maybe you’d better pull the drapes as well, Boswell,” the Black Pope said.

“Yes,” I said, “I’ve been thinking about that.” It was a good chance to get away. I hadn’t forgotten that there were others to visit. I stood up and began again my counter-clockwise promenade about the room. It was Market Day, the opening of the Fair, the Easter Parade.

I still felt uneasy about not being everywhere and everyone at once. It was no longer, I think, that I feared to miss them doing their turns, seeing them at their most expansive and best. Almost without my being aware of it a new weight of maturity had settled upon me like dust, the old-shoe ease of compromise. I felt older, and I knew that I would have been content to share their boredom or know their bleakness — to have been, so to speak, a crumpled handkerchief in the torn pocket of their gray bathrobes. As I reflected on this I realized that I knew nothing of human beings really, nothing of their characters, nothing even of their experience. The desire to know what people thought was a torment, like gazing at heights in the night sky and wondering if there could be life on other planets and what it would be like if there were, always knowing that you would never know, that some day others might, but you, never. The weight of one’s solitary existence was overwhelming; one was pinned by it, caged by it like an animal. (Surely, I thought, love is only the effort weak men put forth to compromise their solitariness.) One could not be sure of others; one could not be sure they didn’t lie when they said they were solitary too. I was Moses brought so far and no further, my single knowledge the knowledge of the margin that separated me from all I had ever hoped for, that margin another desert, another complicated wilderness. To be teased with sight and hearing and speech and to have seen and heard only oneself, held conversation with only oneself — this was the sad extravagance of life. Sure, I was less badly off than many men — I was not a little blind boy, I was no one who was starving, I was not someone with a wife in the hospital or a man with no legs — but trouble was trouble.

I nodded to Robert Frost. “Provide, provide,” I said.

I saluted the Cabinet. “Who’s minding the store?” I said.

I spotted Harold Flesh by himself in a corner. “Stick ’em up, Harold,” I said.

“Mr. Boswell,” someone called. “Mr. Boswell.” It was W.H. Lome, Jr. He stuck out his hand.

“How are you?” I asked.

“I just thought of something,” he said. “If a man owned a tavern his friends would have to buy their liquor when they came to see him.” It was his way of greeting anyone who had known his father.

“The rich get richer,” I said, and nodded to a tall old man standing by the sweets table.

“Ah, Boswell,” he said.

“M’lord,” I said.

Nate was at the table d’afrique. “It’s marvelous,” he said. “It’s costing me a fortune but it’s marvelous.”

“Two hundred is too unwieldy a number,” I said. “They don’t even know each other.”

“No, it’s marvelous. I want to thank you for doing this for me.”

“Dope,” I said. Something occurred to me. “Here,” I said, taking off the mantle of Host the Queen had hung around my neck and handing it to him. “It’s restricting my progress.”

“No, I couldn’t,” Nate said.

“You will.”

“No, I really couldn’t.”

“Damn it, I said you will.” I grabbed him and held him with one arm while I slipped the mantle over his head.

“No, it’s yours,” he said shyly. “Really, Boswell.”

I twisted the mantle tightly and holding both reins pulled up on them sharply. Nate fell against me as I choked him. “We’ll hear no more about it,” I said. “You’re the Host.”

“Well, then,” he said, “thank you. I want to show Perry. Where’s Perry? He’ll have to see this.”

I felt a little better after strangling Nate. It was still necessary, however, to organize the two hundred — at least necessary to start with them if I ever hoped to do anything about the others outside, and the others elsewhere, all the people behind the Iron Curtain and the people in the Andes and Tierra del Fuego and the Australian outback and the handful in the Antarctic and people on tiny islands in the Pacific and the populations of Europe and Asia and Africa. A general call would have to go out in a language they all could understand. Of course there would be problems, but first things first.

I clapped my hands. With the shock of my palms coming together my vision darkened. The reds went deeper. It was as if I were looking now through blood, but I also felt a kind of boozy randiness. I clapped my hands again; four or five people looked around and grinned.

I clapped my hands a third time. “Your attention. Your attention, please,” I called.

“Shh. It’s the Host,” someone said.

“You’d better get up on something if you want them to hear you. Two hundred is an unwieldy number,” said General Manara. He had won two additional stars since I had first met him in the Gibbenjoy home in Philadelphia. One was his Korean Star and the other was for Miscellaneous Small Wars.

“Of course,” I said. I cleared away some of the food from the table d’afrique: a small zebra fillet (I was surprised to see that the stripes were carried through into the meat itself — Of course, I thought, light meat and dark meat) and a platter of lion livers. Climbing onto the table, I clapped my hands a final time.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” I called. Nate looked embarrassed. “For History,” I whispered hoarsely. I spotted Margaret across the room with Harold Flesh. “Where the hell have you been?” I yelled, but I was careful not to yell in exactly her direction so that no one else could hear me. I didn’t wait for her answer.

“Mr. President, Queen, Warlords, Chairmen of Boards, Leaders, Owners, Guests and Friends — Ladies and Gentlemen. May I have your attention for a moment?” Gradually people began to look up at me. With their eyes on me I noticed that I felt a little warm; excited as I was I made a mental note of this. (I had never before been aware of the sheer physical heat generated by attention.) I waited until they finished coughing. “All right,” I said, “now look. Two hundred is too unwieldy a number to work with if we’re going to get anything out of this. Now I’ll be perfectly frank with you. I don’t personally give a good goddamn if the rest of you get anything out of it at all. That’s your lookout. But I’m here for a good time. Let me hear it if you feel that way about it too.” They applauded brightly. They were a surprisingly tractable group to work with, I thought. It would probably be harder when I got everybody together. Already I was thinking tentatively of a suitable site, the Sahara perhaps, or a huge platform built out over the Atlantic. “All right then,” I said sharply, “let’s get organized. I want all of you Nobel Prize winners to stand up and go over to that wall.” I pointed to the small table of space foods Nate had set up. “That’s right, Morty, by the space pastes.” Morty was the only one who had moved. “Come on now, the rest of you as well. Follow Dr. Perlmutter, please.” I indicated the South American poet. “Señor,” I said, “por favor, if you please.” He smiled shyly but stayed where he was. “To get the hell to where I told you,” I shouted. “All right,” I said when he had started, “now Dr. Green.”

“I didn’t know Green had a Nobel Prize,” someone whispered.

“Peace Prize,” his son the senator said, giggling.

“Now where’s that team from Cal Tech?” I spotted two Chinese lounging near Harold and Margaret. They grinned good-naturedly and set off to join the others. “They go everywhere together,” I told the crowd. “Ying and Yang.” I looked around the room. “Where’s my chemist?” I demanded. “Where’s my authority on International Law?” I prodded the remaining Nobel Prize winners, and soon they made a sizable group by the table. I carefully arranged the rest of them around the room and smiled down at the group approvingly.

“Are we all here?” I asked. “Who’s minding the world?” I motioned for silence.

“Okay,” I said, “the way I see it is this. There’s a symbol involved. We’re behind closed doors, as Green says, but in a deeper sense we’ve always been behind closed doors, if you see what I mean. Well now, I don’t think that’s a very satisfactory way to have to live. Personally I think I’m missing a lot that I might otherwise be getting out of life. Incidentally, I want you to notice that I’m addressing you in clichés. That’s the deliberate oratorical style I’ve adopted in order to reach the greatest possible number with the least possible misunderstanding. It’s going to be my lingua franca with you. I tell you this because my cards are on the table and I don’t intend to pull the wool over anybody’s eyes. I’m not that kind of person. As a matter of fact I have absolutely nothing to hide. Indeed, I never had. But the rest of you—my God! Ask anybody here if Boswell hasn’t always been open and aboveboard in his dealings. I think you’ll find that if the truth were known I certainly have.

“Now you ask what my purpose is and I tell you it’s simply this. I can’t stand the idea of your knowing something I don’t know. Now I know why that is. I haven’t lived this long in the world for nothing. It’s just that you people have to die. I understand that. If you people lived forever you’d be better people than you people are. But you don’t live forever so you become all shut up inside and you rush around hither and yon from pillar to post, keeping your own counsel, living your own lives, with no regard for me and what I might require of you. I know, I know — it’s a rat race. But I’m of the opinion that it doesn’t have to be that way, that if we just use a little common sense and try a little harder to help the other fellow we can change all that. Just as an example, look what we have not fifty feet away from us right out there on Broadway. Open the drapes please, Nate.”

Nate pulled back the drapes and we could see the crowds outside surge forward, swinging their heads around each other’s necks to get a better look at us.

“Okay, Nate, you can close them now. You see? That’s what I mean. You create this wake of curiosity wherever you go. Now these are just little people and you might think they don’t count for much and I grant you that, but the principle is unchanged.

“All right. What I’m asking you to do is to forget your own deaths for a minute and think about mine. That isn’t selfish or unreasonable of me as it might sound. I mean, when you come right down to it I never had anything very much to do with death, and the same can’t be said for a lot of you people. As a matter of fact, some of you folks have been making a pretty good profit out of it for years. Don’t get the wrong idea — I’m not condemning you. You have to make a buck, a name, wherever you can; I appreciate that. General Manara here, for example, has four stars on each shoulder of each suit in his closet. Now just as an approximation, General, how many lives do you suppose each of those stars represents? Just as an approximation, now.”

The general blushed and looked away.

“Just so,” I said. “And it’s pretty much the same story with most of you. Perlmutter here deals in dying cultures. He won’t touch them unless they’re unspoiled. Well, how many of you have ever stopped to consider what an unspoiled culture actually is? It’s one without proper facilities for sanitation, without electricity, without hospitals or a balanced diet or a vaccination program. Anything, in fact, which might extend longevity by a single day may be said to contribute to culture spoilage.

“But I don’t mean to bring this down to a personal level. What’s true of General Manara and Morty here is just as true of a lot of others. Quick, Black Pope, how does a Christian get into your Heaven?”

“He must first die,” the Black Pope said.

“There — you see? And that’s not all. Some of you who are doctors, haven’t you sometimes sent a bill to the next of kin after you’ve already lost the patient? There are lawyers among us, prosecuting attorneys.” I pointed to a famous district attorney.

“Hey, wait a minute,” he said. “I’m not even in favor of capital punishment.”

“There is no other kind, sir,” I said. “But that’s not the point. As I said before, I’m not attacking anybody. It’s just that I’m trying to get across to you that I come to you with my hands clean, a veritable Switzerland among men.”

I paused while they nodded to each other like people who find themselves in agreement about a good pianist. Some of them even winked. I could see that I had impressed them; even Lano was concentrating intently upon me. Only Morty, that egoist, seemed a little bored; I saw him pop a pill onto his tongue. It seemed to me he frowned but of course it may just have been the bitter taste of the dissolving chemicals. Which was an example of what I meant: it was impossible to know what was really happening to someone else.

“Now in a kind of way,” I went on, “all I mean to get across to you in this little talk is that I exist. I don’t really think you’ve been as cognizant of that fact in the past as you might have been. No, don’t protest — I think that if you’ll just look into your hearts you’ll see that what I’ve said is quite true.”

I gave them time to consider this. “He’s right, you know,” I heard the President of the United States say. “I haven’t been as cognizant of him as I might have been.”

The Party Whip patted his arm reassuringly. “You can’t keep every campaign promise. No one expects you to.”

“Now let me emphasize again, I’m not attacking you,” I said. “You’ve had your reasons, little as I might think of them, and I’m perfectly willing to let bygones be bygones.” I held out my hands as if to bless them. “Let us look upon this night as a new dawn, my friends — the dawn of a fresh start, a second chance.” Disappointingly, they did not applaud here, and I rushed on. “I speak from this platform to you world leaders — and later, I trust, from a still wider platform to a still more inclusive group — of a second chance.” I lowered my voice. “But let no man here think that this is my only object,” I warned. “Indeed, I would be less than honest with you if I left you with the impression that this was all I expected.”

“It’s quite the most remarkable speech I’ve ever heard,” someone said. “What do you think, Perlmutter?”

“It’s atavistic, archetypal,” Morty said offhandedly. “I’ve heard it all before.”

“The fact is,” I said, “I am quite as much aware of your own existences as I have asked you to be of mine. Had I the time I should ask you to listen as I revealed to you every thought I have ever had, each variegated personal impression, intuition, in the wide, but alas not wide enough, kaleidoscope of my consciousness. I should urge upon you in detail the panorama of James Boswell’s experiential life. But”—here I shrugged—“I haven’t the time, and surely this is all our loss, for what splendid release there would be for you in knowing in toto another’s experience, another’s vision! No savior could do more! Nor would that be all, for then I should require of you each in turn to reveal yourselves in just such a way to me, ‘and I should give, step by step, my reactions to your own and ask of you yours to mine and then offer to you mine to yours to mine, and so on and so forth. Nor would that even then be all. I would not be content that this should be done only here where the fire laws allow the seating of a mere two hundred people. We would gather on a great plain where all might come, black and white, gentile and Jew, rich and poor, believer and Turk, young and old, quick and dead, without regard to race, creed or color. There, all would partake of the gentle communion I speak of. Then might we know one another indeed, and begin to dissipate the unwholesome — I say unwholesome — mystery which hangs now like a miasma about each separate, solitary life!”

“Quite remarkable,” the man who had spoken before said.

“Ho hum,” Morty said. “Archetypal. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.”

“It does not,” I yelled. “Hear me out,” I demanded.

“Hear, hear,” the Queen of England said. Others took the cry up and Morty, looking amused and superior, shrugged.

“Give the man a chance, there,” Harold Flesh shouted after everyone had quieted down, his timing a little off.

“All right,” I said, “all right. There isn’t time. I wasn’t born yesterday. I know there isn’t time — there isn’t that much time in the world. Only I think it very peculiar that a certain party could already have forgotten what the proper study of mankind finally is. I won’t go into that— this isn’t the time and place for indulging in personalities. I am content that you all know who I mean.

“All right, then. What I’m getting at is this. Since there isn’t time for the other thing, we’re going to have to find a kind of shorthand for it, and it’s occurred to me that one way we might do that is by looking upon each other as metaphors. That’s right. I’ve been working on this for some time now and I think it’s a breakthrough. Do you follow me here? It would be like a morality play. You know. Only much more sophisticated. We’d be using metaphors to reveal ourselves to each other.

“Now it’s not for me to say what metaphor each of you is. It’s a free country and of course I have my opinions, based on sensitive, scientific observation, but admittedly one has to allow a certain margin for error. It’s that margin, ladies and gentlemen, which I hate! Which of us can afford to be wrong about which of us? Do you see what I mean? Do you see how important this is? As I see it there’s only one alternative, the one I’ve just suggested. Every man his own anthropologist! That would be our cry. Do away with the middleman entirely. Okay. Don’t speak out at once. Consider your essences, your basic properties as men, the individual quality of your lives, before you make your metaphorical reductions. Let no secret be sacred, no area of your soul undefiled. The watchword is Trespass! Trespass, gentlemen, trespass!

“Now synchronize your watches. Begin!” I was sweating as I waited for one of them to make a start. I searched their red faces for a sign. I had touched them, I knew that. They were silent, concentrating. A red smile played unconsciously across several mouths, perhaps touched off by some memory of what they were or had once been. In a few eyes red tears appeared and flowed like blood down the burning cheeks. Only Morty’s face seemed clear, unconcerned, with that nauseating look of self-containment I had come to despise in men.

I waited, giving them as much time as I could. At last I saw that though many of them had found the metaphor that would express themselves — their very faces shone with their solutions — each was reluctant to be the first. Or perhaps that was giving them the benefit of the doubt. I had put them in touch with something valuable they had been unaware of, had indicated to them where a treasure lay buried, and now they stood before me stiff with greed.

Pretending that I misunderstood I resumed my speech. “Come, come,” I said, “it isn’t that hard. As thus: ‘As egocentric as Harold Flesh.’ Or in another vein, ‘As egocentric as Morty Perlmutter.’” Here Morty put another pill into his mouth. “I feel absolutely seized with inspiration,” I confessed. “Here’s another one: ‘As egocentric as James Boswell.’ That might be even further compressed. ‘As egocentric as Boswell.’ ‘Egocentric as Boswell.’ These are only rough approximations — I’m not a poet, you understand. They need polishing, of course, and I’ve no doubt that many of you can do as well if not better than that, but it’s the sort of thing I mean. How’s this one—‘As self-centered as Jim Boswell’? Well?”

They seemed to admire my analogies, and I thought that perhaps I had misjudged them; perhaps they had merely been struck dumb by the aptness of my thought, the happiness of my language, and were reluctant to compete with me on that basis. At any rate, I saw that I would have to be patient. “All right,” I said, “this isn’t the last time we’ll be getting together. I expect you to do your homework and be prepared to recite your metaphors when we meet again.”

I looked around. They seemed relieved that I had left them off so easily. Only Morty’s expression had not changed. I owe you one, I thought, as I looked at him.

“Well then,” I said, “we’ve been pretty serious tonight. I’ve made some rather heavy demands on you, I think, and it occurs to me that one reason may be that my speech has been without much humor. Most public speakers like to sprinkle a few jokes into their talks. Usually those jokes come at the beginning, but to demonstrate that I’m not atavistic and that ontogeny doesn’t always recapitulate phylogeny—and never has in my own case—I’d like to reverse the usual order and tell you one right here at the end.”

They were smiling, already prepared to like my story, but I ignored them and looked directly at Morty. “There was this Jewish lady,” I began, “whose husband died and left her a lot of money. So one day she got into this huge Cadillac convertible and drove down to Miami Beach to the biggest, flashiest hotel they had there.”

Morty glowered at me and put out his tongue to receive another pill.

“When she pulled up in front of the hotel she leaned on the horn until a bellboy came around to open the door for her.”

The color had begun to drain from his face. “‘Look here,’ she says in a loud voice, ‘I’m Mrs. Ginsberg, and I’ve reserved the biggest suite in the hotel. You’ll carry up my bags to it, yeah? And you shouldn’t forget the MINK COAT in dee t-r-ronk!’”

Watching me, Morty was now desperately putting one pill after another into his mouth.

“So the woman rides up in the elevator to her penthouse suite and waits for the bellboy to come up with her bags.”

Now Morty’s was the only face that was not red. He had taken the bottle of pills from his pocket and unscrewed the cap. Raising the bottle to his mouth he began to pour the pills directly onto his tongue. He chewed obscenely, his pale jaws working automatically, rapid and clumsy as an infant seeking a breast.

“In a little while the bellboy comes up loaded down with so many suitcases you can’t even see his face. He puts them down and the woman starts to take a dime out of her purse to give it to him, but all of a sudden she stops. ‘Vere’s de boy?’ she asks.

“Well, the guy looks at her, not understanding. 1 beg your pardon,’ he pants. ‘Where’s what boy?’ “‘De boy,’ she says, ’de boy.’

“‘Do you mean that grown man I saw in the back seat?’ he asks.

“‘Yeah, him,’ she says. ‘My son, in de beck. Vat’s de matter you didn’ carry him up too?’

“‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ the bellboy says, ‘I didn’t realize he couldn’t walk.’

“‘He cen valk, he cen valk,’ she says. ‘Tenk God he doesn’t have to.’”

Morty was gasping for breath. He had run out of pills and was clutching at his chest as if to stop blood that might be flowing from it. The rest of the people in the room hadn’t seen him and were still laughing. I pointed to Morty, who was on his knees now, pulling in terror at his collar.

“Dr. Perlmutter doesn’t get it,” I said calmly.

They stared at him and one by one raised their hands to their faces, to stop their laughter as they would a sneeze. They spread away from him evenly, creating around him an island of space.

On his back now, Morty looked up at me helplessly. Already his death had settled and he had begun to shrink. It was very interesting. His white face was a stain in the room. Gradually, as it had when I had cut myself off from my son, my body began to strengthen. Morty’s vitality flowed into me. I felt myself grow taller. My vision cleared. As he continued to shrink I continued to grow. I was becoming a giant. I filled the room, forcing the others to flee into corners, pressing them hopelessly against the walls, jamming them with my expanding body into tiny cul-de-sacs of space, smashed shards of dimension. As they suffocated and died they began to shrink also and so made more room. Others rushed into the space they made only to crash against my irresistible growth, nudged murderously by my expanding shins and enlarging thighs. They too died and shrank, feeding me freedom, precious room, which I needed now as others need air. I was filling out like a balloon — only not hollow. Solid, with a beautiful, felt solidity. I was greater than the room now and expanding into the street itself, where the crowds fell back from me as they would from a tidal wave. There was no place for them to go, and soon I had taken their space as I had taken the others’ before. And still I continued to grow. Whole populations were plunged into a stifling darkness in the shadow of my calves. Races divided into my pockets and no sooner had found room there than my thighs, swelling, smothered them against the lining. Gradually the cries of the stricken began to subside, their great grief silent only when there were no more mourners.

“Ah,” I said, my voice like thunder in the surrounding silence, “a way had to be found, and a way was found.!”

IX

Roger brought up the tuxedo I had rented, and waited while I dressed.

“Do you like a cummerbund, sir?” he asked.

He had started to call me sir again when he found out I was involved with The Club. The columnists had been talking about it for weeks, publishing the names of everyone who would be there and somehow making it sound like a journey of Magi. Some papers, taking note in their editorial columns of the diversity of the guests, had indicated a possible conspiracy of the important, a first move of the famous toward some still unstated end. Reading as news of something which had originated with me (though I was mentioned only as someone who would be there), I sometimes found it difficult to believe that I had had anything to do with The Club at all. I was very nervous.

Roger went to the window again and looked out

“Still raining?”

“Very nasty, sir. A cloudburst.”

I struggled with my tie.

“I’d better go down and get you a taxi, sir. Do you have money?”

“Yes.”

“Better not take too long, sir. They won’t wait on a night like this.”

It was almost eight o’clock. The people had probably been arriving for an hour now.

“Roger, can you fix this damn thing?”

He made a deft bow, a knot hard and round as a black button. “Don’t forget your raincoat, sir, or you’ll be drenched just getting into your taxi.”

He left me and I went to the closet. I felt terrible. After a month I was still troubled by my dream. My raincoat was the one I had used when I had been with Lano in the mountains, a great stiff brown canvas coat from some earlier war. I put it on over my evening clothes and shoved the hinged, rusted fasteners through the holes. Going out, I saw myself in the mirror. Years ago in a school play, just before the curtain had gone up, I had felt like this. I had asked myself what the hell I was doing there and had wanted to run.

The phone rang.

“Yes?”

“It’s me,” Margaret said.

“Yes, Margaret?”

“I’ve been staying in a hotel.”

“Yes, Margaret?”

“Well, how are you?”

“I’ve been sick,” I said. “I’m still quite weak.”

“David told me. I called him.”

“I see.”

“He was beaten up very badly by a queer. Did you know that?”

“No.”

“Yes, well he was. He’s better, but I gather he’s living alone now.”

“We all are, aren’t we?”

In the mirror, in the enormous baggage of the rough coat, I looked like a defector, someone running for his life.

“Boswell? Are you still there?”

“Yes. I’m here.”

“Do you want me to come back?”

“Nah,” I said, and hung up.

Roger had not found a cab for me. “It’s the rain,” he said. “If you’ll wait here, sir, I’ll go around to the avenue again and try to get one.”

“I’m late,” I said. “I’d better start walking.”

“You’ll ruin your clothes.”

“No, it’s letting up.” When I walked out from under the striped canopy, the rain had let up. Even if I saw a cab I would not want it now.

I walked toward Nate’s. I was a little calmer but still depressed. I came out on Broadway into the light, within easy range of the exploding signs, the excitement of neon like a kind of war. As I continued toward Nate’s I became aware of the crowds almost congealing round me, seemingly increased at every side street and doorway. We moved slowly, thickly, in a single direction. I had caused this, I thought; I had invented The Club and caused this.

Across Broadway Nate’s red sign flared like the name of a boat above the heads of people looking up at it from a pier. I tried to move faster, using the last of the old great strength, pushing past people who looked up at me resentfully. “Excuse me,” I said. “Will you please get out of my way?” I said.

I made my way toward the curb. There were yellow barricades lining my side of the street; the other side had been roped off and it was clear except for photographers, doormen and police. On this side policemen on horseback patrolled the curbs. Other policemen leaned back into the crowds.

I was surrounded by a sort of incredible democracy. There were lovers, tourists, children, salesmen down from their hotel rooms, students, old people; there were adolescents, strangely brutalized, already unrespectable (I wondered if the boys carried knives, if the girls laid). All of them, jammed together in an anonymous intimacy, glared with a kind of solemn envy into every car that pulled up. Their feelings mixed, their faces showed the surprise and controlled resentment of people watching something which had nothing to do with themselves.

“There’s one,” a man next to me said.

“Can you see who it is?” another asked.

“Some movie star, I think. Jesus, look at all them jewels.”

“A studio paste job,” someone else said expertly.

“That’s the Secretary of State getting out of that limousine,” a man said.

“Where? No, that isn’t him.”

“It is so. That’s the Secretary of State.”

“Look at Nate Lace. He doesn’t know who to shake hands with first. Hi ya, Nate.”

“I never got my invitation,” a large young man said.

“Why’s that?”

“I’m incognito,” he said.

People laughed.

“Listen, plenty will be happening in there tonight. Don’t kid yourself.”

“There’s the millionaire, whatsisname. Look at that Rolls he’s in.”

“It’s like a goddamn housing project.”

“That’s the Governor with him.”

“Something’s up,” a woman said. “I don’t like it.”

“Nah, they’re just going to get each other’s autographs and go home.”

“Excuse me,” I said, “I’ve got to get through.”

“Don’t shove, will you. We’re all trying to see.” o

“Let me by, I’ve got to get over there.”

“He’s representing the old soldiers,” someone said.

“Get out of my way.”

I was about to step between two barricades when a policeman pushed me back. “It’s blocked off, Charley,” he said. “The big shots are throwing a party.”

“I’ve got to get through.”

“Not here you don’t.”

“Look,” I said, “this is ridiculous. I’m supposed to be over there.”

“Oh, you are, are you?” he said. “Who in hell do you think you are?”

“I started it all,” I said.

“He’s Adam,” said the young man who had told us he was incognito.

“There’s one in every crowd,” the policeman said good-naturedly. “I’ve been working these affairs fifteen years and there’s one in every crowd. Gate crashers! If it’s a parade there’s always some nut who thinks he ought to be marching.”

I tugged at my raincoat to show him the dinner jacket beneath it. “There,” I said, “does this look as if I didn’t belong there?”

Clearly I had surprised him. “Well, I don’t know,” he said, rubbing his jaw. “Who are you?”

It was like old times. Only the doormen were backed up now by cops with guns. It made it a contest. I felt giddy. “You wouldn’t know my name,” I said.

The policeman grinned. “Nice try, Charley, you had me there for a minute.”

“I’m a gentleman of the press.”

“Take my picture,” he said.

“I’m the caterer.”

“Give me a sandwich,” he said.

“I’m the entertainer.”

“Sing me a song,” he said.

“You don’t believe I belong over there, do you?” I said.

“No, sir, I don’t. Now quiet down. These folks are trying to get a look at the big shots.”

“So you don’t think I’m a big shot?”

“All men were created equal, fella. Just quiet down, now.”

“You’re an idiot,” I said. In a minute I could tell him who I was and it would be all over.

“What’s that?”

In a minute I could tell him who I was, but I felt a weird pressure, as though at last I was about to do something infinitely mad, press a claim infinitely untenable. “I said you’re an idiot,” I said.

The policeman turned away. “I’m having trouble with a guy,” he said to another policeman. “Signal the wagon.”

“You still don’t know who I am?” I said.

“I only know what you are,” he said.

“Then look!” I shouted. I thrust my face to within inches of his own, holding it like a fist before his eyes.

He backed off uncertainly, startled. “Listen,” he said uneasily, “if you really are with that crowd, why don’t you just tell me who you are and we can check? Then I’ll guide you personally across the street.”

I turned to the people around me and winked. “He wants to know who I am. Fifteen years he’s been working these affairs and he wants to know who I am.”

They laughed, in, they thought, on the gag. “Shall I tell him, sir?” the young man asked.

“Not yet,” I said. “Give him another chance.” I turned back to the policeman and stared at him. I would do it with my eyes, I thought; I would use my vision as a battering ram. In the gym, in the old days, it had been a mistake to lift bar bells, pull against heavy springs. People need people to work out against. I held my face in front of him, balancing it as steady as a weapon.

“Look,” he said nervously, “let’s stop all this. Just tell me your name.”

Across the street cars continued to discharge the famous onto the sidewalk in front of Nate’s, the men and women like secular gods — imperious, flattered, giving nothing. All that stood between us was my name. It was incredible that anyone should ever get what he wanted, and I experienced, sharp as pain, deep as rage, a massive greed, a new knowledge that it was not enough, that nothing was ever enough, that we couldn’t know what was enough or want what was enough. It wasn’t even a question of deserts. Everybody deserved everything.

I had been working these affairs for fifteen years myself, I thought. In all that time I never once used a false name. It had been an incredible burden, a useless loyalty.

Now I used one. It came out of my mouth like the words of a song, like a poem, like a beautiful, triumphant idea, a piece of the truth. I said it recklessly, like someone stepping from behind his shield to throw a spear. I felt light, relieved, free.

The policeman shrugged helplessly. “Do you have any identification?” he asked.

“Not with me,” I said arrogantly.

He looked at the other policeman. “We’d have to see some identification,” the second policeman said.

“I don’t have any.”

“That’s just what I thought,” the first policeman said. “Now come on, stand back. The joke’s over.” He turned his back to me.

I nodded indifferently and made a face behind the policeman’s back. I grinned and the people in the crowd clapped me on the shoulder.

“There’s a cardinal getting out of that car,” someone, said.

“Look who just pulled up in that Cadillac.”

“Now that’s the Secretary of State!”

“Yes,” a man said, “you’re right.”

So I watched. Peacefully, with the others. The self at rest, the ego sleeping, death unremembered for once.

I had lived my life like someone bereaved, keeping over it always a sort of deathwatch. And why not? I was always dying. I had a disease. It was neither metaphysical nor psychosomatic, and it was less immoral, finally, then simply unhygienic, pathological. It was a disease, this gluttony of the ego — a lifelong feast on the heart, wounding, tearing, devouring, leaving it in a ruin, disgusting as the scraps, the indigestible bones and fats that smeared the plate. That baffled our chances and wasted our hope and used up our lives.

But what’s this, what’s this? What was I thinking of? The ego, the ego. Sleeping? Say, I thought, who was I kidding? Why, I was like Nate’s zebra fillets. With me, too, the stripes went all the way through, all the way down. They were my longitudes and my latitudes. I know where I’m going. Nowhere I’m going! I made The Club. I know about creation. Everybody dies, et cetera. Well, not yet, not just yet. Rise and shine, I thought. Rise and shine, old sleepy slugabed of a self.

“Hey,” I called from the barricades. “Hey,” I called across the wide street to the Secretary of state. “Hey, hey, down with The Club. Down with The Club. Down with The Club!”