Searches & Seizures

The Condominium

“NO DREAM,” he would write, “not a vision, not even a reverie. No fancy nor aspiration either. No crummy goal nor lousy aim. Something harder, acknowledged. More real than any of these. Something two-in-the-bush realer than any bird. Right up there with death and taxes.

“A place to live, to be. Out of what vortical history came spinning this notion of a second skin? From what incipit, fundamental gene of nakedness came, laboring like a lung, insistent as the logical sequences of a heartbeat, the body’s syllogisms, this demand for rind and integument and pelt? (Small wonder our daddies were tailors, needlers and threaders, or that our mothers threw up an archaeology on the dining room table, first the wood, varnished and glossed and waxed, then thick baize pads, next a linoleum, then a plain cloth and then a crocheted, a sheet of plastic over all with a bowl of fruit, a dish of candy, a vase of flowers, and none of this for protection and even less for ornament, but just out of dedication to weight as a principle, a tropism in the bones for mass and hide.) Out of what frightful trauma of exclusion arose this need, what base expulsion from what cave during which incredible spell of rotten weather?

“And never land, never real estate, the land grant unheard of, unimagined and unnecessary (what could you do with land?), even the notion of a ‘promised land’ merely religion, poetry. No. No great Mosaic East India Company tracts in the background, no primogenitive tradition of estates, properties, patents and dominions. Not land, not dirt, only what land and dirt threw up, its lumbers and sands and clays and ores and stones — its ingredients, like a recipe for cement.”

“His father,” he would write, “met his mother at ‘camp.’ There were tents but this may have been before tents. Somewhere there was a photograph of young men in bedrolls, his father and his shrouded pals like disaster victims laid out in a line in the sun. And the girls — Floradora, Gibson, Bloomer, whatever the Twenties term for their type may have been — with already about them a sepia hunt of nostalgia puffing their knickers, thickening their socks, bagging their sweaters, complicating their curls. Weekend fraternities—‘The River Rats,’ ‘The Crusoe Club,’ ‘The Peninsula Club’—and sororities—‘The Blueschasers,’ ‘The Flappers,’ ‘The Go-to-Hell-God-Damnits’—of the white-collar working class down to New Jersey on the train from New York, the city. He had spent more than half his summers there, but had no fixed memory of the place because it was always changing. When he was a boy it was like living on a sound stage, some studio town going up before his eyes. He watched the carpenters, the Phil-Gas, the diggers of septic tanks, all the electricians, all the Dugan’s and Breyer’s Ice Cream and Borden’s Milk and Nehi Soda people opening up routes, signing up customers, civilizing this wilderness as ever any missionaries or conquistadors civilized theirs. He saw electricity come in, city water, mail (the rural delivery boxes like the tunnels for toy trains, PATERSON MORNING CALL or BERGEN MESSENGER stenciled on the tin tunnels like names for the trains).

“So the tents came down (never having actually seen the tents, he nevertheless sensed them, or rather their absence, knowing that he walked not through fields and cleared woods but along lots and parcels, and that antecedent to these there would have to have been sites) and the bungalows went up, each summer some new section of the colony developed, the new bungalows put up in pairs or fours or half-dozens, as though speculators and contractors were incapable of dealing in anything but even numbers, their insistence on the careful geometric arrangements like architecture’s on some principle of equilibrium, a vaguely military hedging against the failure of their enterprise. Only his and a few of the other bungalows owned, or anyway mortgaged, not rented, by his parents and a handful of collateral old-timers, ‘pioneers’—some of them relatives, all of them friends — as they styled themselves, had been put up independently. (And didn’t he feel proud, aristocratic even, with the distinction imposed by ownership?)

“The bungalows went up and he went to meet the Friday night trains on the hill that brought the droves of what were still called campers for their weekend in the country. Saw with the gradual development the appearance of the fabulous ‘extras’—handball courts, an entire ball field with wooden bases, two or three tennis courts and, one summer (it had gone up over the winter) an actual outdoor roller-skating rink, which later, when the bungalows were finally purchased, the developers would fail to maintain so that he would see it literally reclaimed, the shuffleboard court inset within the oval rink the first to go, the painted numbers fading, fading, gone like a dissolve in films, then weeds springing up irresistibly through cracks in the cement that had not been there the year before and the once smooth white concrete overrun with sudden wolf-man growths and sproutings, the rink itself collapsing piecemeal, drowning in ivies, nettles, briars and poisonous-looking trees. Eventually not a handball court was left standing, not a tennis court, nor a single dock for canoes, the rollers rusted, jammed, as if the renters, now owners themselves, had no interest in the out-of-doors at all, had repudiated it, as if life were meant to be lived inside and the games they once played as bachelor boys and bachelor girls—‘The Good Sports,’ ‘The Merry Maidens’—were over, literally, the scores frozen, more final than Olympic records. (Though he and his cousins and friends still used the courts, their skills damaged by the disrepair.)

“But — this was the period of transition before the renters became owners — the developers themselves were now the aristocracy. Men like Klein and Charney, rarely seen and imbued with power and magic like emperors of Japan, not just through money or force (he’d seen Charney, an old, crippled millionaire driven in a limousine by a black man who smoked cigars, parked in front of his eight bungalows to collect the rents shyly offered up to him through the barely opened window of his car) but through ownership itself: men with houses, power to evict. That many of the bungalows stood vacant during the war didn’t detract from this power but reinforced it, as though men with empty houses were even more powerful than men with full ones. (Klein he’d also seen, a fat man like the Captain in the Katzenjammer Kids, walrus mustache and all, who always wore a khaki shirt.)”

(“And what, incidentally,” he would write in the margin, “was all this crap? This stroll down memory lane? I didn’t care a fart for my childhood, was more moved by someone else’s — anyone’s. Why, I was the kid who went to bed early, whose mother had me in the sack at seven o’clock, even in summer, whom daylight saving failed to save, imposing on me instead with its bright eight-thirties a sense — some of this was wartime, remember — of having worked night shifts, swing shifts, putting him — me — at odds, possibly forever, with the light.”)

“Later, the war over now, the bungalows were winterized. Roofs came down and insulation tucked into them. Porches were enclosed, rooms added on, showers moved inside, money spent. There were almost no bachelors left, though even when they were still around he had already begun to forget who went with whom, seeing the following summer what were still familiar faces in now unfamiliar conjunctions (realizing only later what had happened — winter with its cozy betrayals — and just as light stood for something hostile, so cold began to seem mysterious). Only his parents’ place, one of the first to go up, remained untouched, bungalows his had once dwarfed dwarfing his, bursting their boundaries, inching forward toward the road in a sort of architectural horse race, assuming complicated shapes, the original shell disappearing, swallowed in second and even third growth. Yet no one lived there in winter, or only a handful. The rest were small-time Kleins and Charneys themselves now, landlords casting their nets to catch the overflow from Pompton Lakes (where oddly violent industries had begun to spring up — a munitions factory, a quarry, a training camp for professional boxers, roadhouses that were said to be gambling casinos) but landing instead vague gypsy types, self-proclaimed migrants following nameless crops in unmarked seasons, New Jersey hillbillies with Italian names. As though — he understood what was going on: men of forty plotting their retirements twenty-five years hence where they had been thirty — being a landlord was a necessary first step in becoming a homeowner, as a knowledge of the names of the presidents and their incumbencies was a necessary first step in becoming a citizen. A gradual breaking-in period, in the three summer months they occupied the bungalows themselves learning the bugs of furnace and washing machine and garbage disposal before one dared live amongst such things oneself for any extended period. Meanwhile, in winter, they continued to live in apartments, marking time, getting down payments together, even moving from apartment to apartment as though this too were good practice.

“His parents stopped going in the summer, or went for only a couple of weeks every third or fourth year. The building had stopped entirely. Now, in its hodgepodge of composition roofs and variously synthetic fronts — imitation brick, tile, aluminum siding — it looked like a tub of mixed fonts waiting to be melted down. It was finished. It was awful. High, dangerous grasses grew in the infield, the outfield was a no man’s land, the river too low to swim in, the once presentable Ramapo Mountains behind them gone bald from too much blasting in the quarry. The bungalows, now houses of a sort, were locked into a permanent shabbiness which no paint or extravagance of metal awning could disguise.”

“Meanwhile,” he would write later in his preliminary notes, “in the early Sixties, a word went out: CONDOMINIUM.

“At first one thought it was a metal alloy, or perhaps a new element. Maybe it was used to fashion industrial diamonds. There were those who thought it had to do with big business, international stuff — combines, cartels. Others thought it was a sort of prophylactic. It was strange that the very people who would later become most intimate with the term should at first have had so vague a notion of what it meant. Only after doctors tell him does the patient know the name of his disease. Condominium. (Kon´-d-min´-ē-m.)

“Perhaps it strikes you as strange that these should suddenly have become so popular. After all, the concept is not entirely new; there had been cooperatives for years. But a closer investigation reveals it’s not that mysterious. Myth is more persistent than staph. Accuse others of what you’re guilty of yourself and go scot-free. The Jews, say the gentiles, are too clannish; they stick together. Yet the cooperative was a gentile device, an arrangement whereby individuals owned their own apartments but could not sell them unless they had permission from the other owners. There were few Jews in cooperatives. He did not know any. Participation in a co-op was often restricted and the constituency of a building monolithic. The condominium, on the other hand, simply grants each owner a recordable deed, enabling him to sell, mortgage or otherwise dispose of his property in any way he sees fit, independent of the will and advices of the other owners in the building. It is this last fact which makes all the difference, driving home the last implication of ownership, giving dominion ( con-domini- um) over possession, reserving to the possessor the ultimate rights of belonging, extravagantly excluding all other men’s say-so, finessing all putative ownership’s tithe and obligation and easements, both Platonic and legal, making it unique, total, proprietorship in depth and in fact.

“So Klein and Charney — who weren’t Jewish — lived again. (The two old men, their last bungalows sold, died in the same summer within a month and a half of each other in 1953.) It was an age of developers, fast talkers who had the ear of bankers, insurance companies, financiers, boards of directors — all those mysterious resources where the money was, all those who sat in judgment of the feasible, who, like odds-makers, actuaries of the probable, made the determinations and fine distinctions, running up the flagpoles of the possible this probability and that likelihood, weighing needs and tastes and trends and fixing priority like hoods a horse race. Solomons of the daily life who, surer than legislators or artists, give its look to whatever age they live in wherever they happen to live it. This was the ear the developers had, this the power they had managed to tap.

“There were trial runs, pilot projects. Condominiums went up in Florida and Arizona, existing side by side with the retirement communities, the Sun Cities like reservations for a dying species in nature, the high-rises rising high in the yeasty sun, cities of the plain, sketching skylines where none existed before, the face of nature instantly changed by fiat and ukase — not like Oakland, New Jersey, where it had taken years — here a lake put in and stocked as you’d lay a golf course, there a series of canals and inlets like the interesting underedge of a key. Marinas constructed for people who got seasick and golf courses for duffers who didn’t know doglegs from birdies (and the courses actually fixed, shaving a dozen strokes off the game of even the lousiest player, gravity improving the lie, the water holes and sand traps more optical illusion than obstacle, the customer is always right), ‘country clubs,’ airstrips for the charter flights on converted bombers that bussed potential investors down from Chicago, Cleveland, New York and St. Louis, shopping centers, medical centers, swimming pools and even, in those deserts, gardens.

“It was Oakland, N.J., all over again, but an Oakland blessed by money this time, an Oakland of surfeit, manifesting an unseen but individual will, an individual yet collective style so that the final result approached, in appearance at least, American fiefs and kingdoms, an impression underscored by the pennants on staffs which outlined the approaches to these places and which, along with the flags of the states (one for each state represented in the ownership), waved a sort of visible fanfare, a cracking clothy panoply, suggested actual nationhood, a city-state perhaps, like ancient Florence or old Siena. And the private police too, the security guards in sentry boxes and shelters like little tollbooths along the perimeters and outposts who if they did not actually salute at least smiled a sort of obeisance to every potential buyer and waved him through as if he carried the privileges and immunities of a funeral procession or official cortege.” (“Yes,” he would write excitedly, “Federal! National! Isle this, Cape that, Lake the other, topography built into identity even if topography, a product of blast and bulldozing, was collateral with the development itself. Ha!”)

Then a few days later he would write: “But the developers were wrong; they’d missed their marks, people who had even less interest in the spurious trappings of nationhood than they had in fishing the stocked man-made lakes or kidding themselves on the tampered greens which bore as much relation to real golf as the ringing bells and falling tin soldiers of a shooting gallery to real warfare. The dream house stood vacant, the planned community went unattended. Even the sun went unattended, the customers seeking shade, air conditioning, the great indoors. You rejected nationhood for neighborhood!

“So it was no surprise to him — who had seen the river wither, the skating rink turn in upon itself, the handball courts crumble and the base paths choke with weeds; who had watched the dissolution of all the communal apparatus, the Junglegym given back to the jungle and even the sidewalks sink — that the attractive nuisances of play were ignored, used only by the occasional grandchild or prospective customer a salesman took fishing. They weren’t wanted. What was wanted was the basic living space: the bath and a half, two-bedroom, Pullman kitchen, living-dining room area where you could put forty years of furniture. Oh, yes, oh yes, indeedy, and perhaps a California or Florida room where the color TV could go, and certainly an outside balcony for the potted plants. But primarily the space, the apartment itself.

“A place to live, to be!”

He was thirty-seven. Single. A famous heart patient. A schoolboy.

And he could answer certain hypothetical questions one often hears about but are rarely put. He could tell you without hesitation — and give reasons — which ten books he would take with him to a desert island. And which ten people could come with him. He could tell you, breaking it down to the penny, how he would dispose of $1,000,000,000 in twenty-four hours. He knew precisely the dozen persons, living or dead, he would most like to meet, and could discourse on what historical era he would prefer to have lived in. Not only that; he could cite the great dead man he would be willing to change places with and the living man or woman he would be if he could be one person other than himself. He knew what age he would be if he had the power to alter his real age. Also he could tell you creditably whether or not he would do it all over again if he could. (He wouldn’t.) He could name his favorite American city and his favorite foreign country. He was a whiz on all the desert isle stuff: not only which ten books or companions but which three films, what single food, which five inventions. If everything in the world had to be just one color, he knew which he’d choose. Finally, he could tell you what his three wishes would be if a powerful magician granted them to him.

It was one of his four or five lectures, and out of habit he still tried to keep the lists up to date, though with the falling off of demand and his all but official retirement — his agency had probably dropped him from its rolls; he didn’t know — his interest in his lists had become academic. Perhaps he was waiting for someone to put these questions to him seriously, an eventuality he reckoned might take place just after the powerful magician appeared. At any rate, he no longer actively pursued replacements, brooding uneasily about them like someone with a name or forgotten word on the tip of his tongue, and there was something anachronistic about some of his lists. He had no substitute, for example, for the “fun person” he would prefer to emergency-land on a jet with — Baby Jane Holzer.

He received the news by telephone. This was what he kept it for, he supposed: incoming and outgoing emergencies. (And also for the correct time and temperature, and to call movie houses to find out when the last feature went on.) He didn’t recognize the man’s voice, only its general tone: gentle but with a certain imperfectly concealed excitement. The way his name might be pronounced by a process server. The man used his first name — Marshall — and told him his father had died.

He flew across the country to Chicago. No fun person sat beside him in the plane, but he found the jet an appropriate and even dignified way to go to a funeral. Rather than urgency and speed he had an impression of stately motion, and from somewhere outside himself, outside perhaps even the plane, he saw himself in profile, his seat upright, his hands forward in his lap, the black seat belt which he kept fastened a decorous sash of mourning. Soberly he decided to purchase a drink and gravely ordered, impersonally as he could, from the passing stewardess.

The sight of the clouds and of a sky as gray as the sea was a fitting approximation of death’s mood in him. He was comforted by the serious presence of businessmen. They would have wills (he himself was an intestate heart patient), irrevocable trusts, safe-deposit boxes, ledgers in which — he imagined tiny writing — they had listed their holdings, a loving, responsible inventory written with Parker pens of their stocks and bonds, the occasional flier (Canadian mining stocks, small backwoods railroads), posthumous earnests of their humor which leavened their blue-chip probity. He supposed many of them to be lawyers, and it was this notion that brought his first forceful recognition that he was an heir. Strangely, there seemed nothing greedy in this awareness. If anything, it made his father’s death even more solemn, as if the transfer of property were a signal of the gravest succession, a rite like a twenty-first birthday — he was thirty-seven but something about his life (he was a schoolboy) had kept him childish, driven him further and further into kidhood — or a sad ceremony of the state. It was just that formal and historical. He would be a wise steward. This occurred to him with the stern idealism of a pledge, an oath of office.

He asked the stewardess for pencil and paper, and when she brought them he lowered the tray table on the seat in front of him and sketched his expectations as a sentimental act, a eulogy to his father. Working with figures that were at least fifteen years old (and at that based on things he’d overheard, occasional glimpses of bankbooks, his recollection of the high insurance premiums his father paid, scraps of memory of the man’s moods, the odd time or two he’d boasted of holding a stock that had split two or three for one), he put together an estimate of his inheritance — perhaps one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars. He knew there was a sixty-thousand-dollar exemption but was not certain it applied to sons. What the death duties might be he had no idea, but he wished to be conservative — this would be the first token of the piety of that wise stewardship — and allowed himself an extravagant conservatism. Say the government took half; say funeral expenses and outstanding debts came to another ten thousand dollars. He would have about fifty thousand. It was no fortune, but he was proud of his father. It was more by several hundred percent than he himself could have left. He wept for his father and himself.

At O’Hare his mood changed. There was no one to meet him (who could have? he was an only child, his father’s brothers were dead; his dad’s sister, a chronic arthritic, lived in a wheelchair in Brooklyn; other than himself and a handful of eastern cousins on his mother’s side no one survived), and he saw how fatuous he had been on the plane, betrayed by the air that held him up, the jet’s great speed, his vulnerability just then to the seeming perfection of the people who had surrounded him. If they were lawyers why weren’t they traveling in first class? He was thankful he hadn’t struck up conversations with them and asked them his questions about death taxes, or offered, as he had been almost prepared to do, to hire them on the spot.

He got into a cab. The driver didn’t — or pretended he didn’t — know the way. “Does Kedzie cut through that far north? I don’t know if Kedzie cuts through that far north.” And so they spent time not on expressways or even main streets, but in neighborhoods, narrow one-way streets, cruising unfamiliar sections of the city he had once lived in, passing discrete yellow brick bungalows — brick everywhere, the brick interests powerful in Chicago, brick bullies, you couldn’t put up a wooden garage — in the ethnic western edges of the city. Am I being taken for a ride, he wondered, staring gloomily from the driver’s neck to the vicious meter. Six dollars and forty-five cents and no sight of land, no birds or green jetsam. Alarmed, he began a crazy, uneasy monologue, throwing out street names for the cabby’s benefit, making up facts, cluing him in that he was no stranger here.

“Cabanne. In the old days this was the red-light district. It was outside the city limits and Big Bill Thompson couldn’t do a thing about it. That’s interesting about Big Bill. You’d think from his name he was a giant or something. Actually he stood only a little over five and a half feet. They called him that because the smallest banknote he carried was a hundred-dollar bill. Oh look, they’ve torn down the animal hospital on Lucas and Woodward.”

The cabby glanced out the window. “Yeah, they needed the space for a vacant lot.”

Then he got tough. “Come on,” he said, “find out where we are. Ask at a gas station.”

He’d been there before it was finished, when all that had existed were three massive foundations like partially excavated ruins and a few Nissen huts (the archeologists might have stayed there) for the sales office and models of the layouts of the apartments. The buildings were up now, an eleven-story center building and two flanking high-rises. Pallidly bricked and lightly mortised — from a distance the walls had the look of pages on which messages have been rubbed out — and lacking ornament, they seemed severe as Russian universities. A modern fountain stood dead center before the main building like a conventionally hung picture. The place seemed encumbered by signs: instructions to tradesmen regarding deliveries, notices about visitor parking, an old hoarding with the names of all the firms that had had anything to do with the construction of Harris Towers, another with an enormous arrow directing prospects to the main office, others that pointed the way to the garages and pools, warnings to trespassers. The names of the buildings, derived from their positions and printed in thick, raised letters on wide brasses, reassured him. (He was a sucker for all stark address. A restaurant that took its name from its street number and spelled it out, writing a cursive Fifty-Seven for 57, was, for him, a piece of elegance that approached the artistic.)

He got out at South Tower but couldn’t get beyond the front door. There was no doorman, but a sort of complicated telephone arrangement had been set up in the outside hall. Where the dial would normally have been was a plastic window with numbers that appeared in it when you turned a knob at its side, like a routing device at the check-in desk of motels. These were the apartment numbers, he guessed. Lifting the phone from its cradle probably signaled the apartment whose number appeared in the plastic window. There was no directory. He spun the knob all the way around hoping that the superintendent might be listed but the numbers were stolid as code. Remembering only that his father’s apartment was on the fifteenth floor, he made a fifteenth-floor number appear in the window and lifted the phone.

“Yes?”

“Hello?”

“Yes?”

“Hello? I’m in the lobby. I’m Phil Preminger’s son, Marshall. I flew in for the funeral. I don’t remember my father’s apartment number.”

“Yes?”

“Can you hear me?”

“I can hear you. Yes?”

“Well, I don’t have his apartment number. Could you let me in? Someone from this building called, but I never got his name. He may have given it to me but in the excitement it didn’t register.”

“I don’t know who called you.”

“Do you know my father’s apartment? Maybe the man who called me is still up there.”

“I’m not at liberty to give out that information.”

“I just flew fifteen hundred miles. What am I supposed to do? Did you know my father?”

“I knew Philip Preminger. I was very sorry to hear Philip Preminger died.”

“Thank you.”

“We had pleasant chats beside the pool.”

“The man who called me said he was a neighbor.”

“We are all neighbors.”

“Could you ring the bell? I’ve got luggage. Maybe I could leave my luggage with you while I find out what to do.”

Suddenly her voice turned hard. “Listen,” she said, “you may be who you say you are. If you are, you are. What did you say your name was?”

“Marshall Preminger.”

“Just a minute.” Whoever it was had evidently left the phone. In a moment she was back. “All right, what’s your father’s sister’s name?”

“My father’s sister?”

“What’s her name? Your aunt.”

“Faye.”

“Last name?”

“Faye Saiger.”

“All right. When’s the interment?”

“Sunday. He said Sunday, the thirteenth. What is all this?”

“What is all this? This proves you could be a fake. Everything you told me is in today’s Tribune. You find out from the notices if there’s survivors, then you come and clean out the place before the body is even in the ground. You have the address of every condominium in the city. You figure they’re all old people in them.”

“This happens?”

“Everything happens. They shouldn’t print those things.”

“Look,” he said, “I’m Marshall Preminger. Phil was my father. What am I going to do with my luggage? What apartment did he live in? Where’s the interment?”

“Read the Trib.”

“Don’t you see? If I had the paper I wouldn’t have to ask you. I’d know.”

“Verisimilitude.”

“What?”

“It’s a trick.”

“I’ll go to the office. They’ll tell me.”

“I apologize in advance if you’re really his son. I’m sorry for your trouble. I’m just protecting him.”

“If I’m not who I say I am,” he said slyly, “I could wait until someone comes out. I could wait until someone comes out and then go in.”

“Sure,” she said, “they try that too. We look you over from behind the glass. If you seem suspicious we get help.”

He went to the office, identified himself and asked for the key. The salesmen were out. The boss was at lunch. The girl was a little nervous. His father’s was the first death in Harris Towers and she wasn’t sure about the legalities. He still held his suitcase — he felt marvelous now that he could be seen — a man from the world in a wrinkled summer suit, a modified Panama hat with a narrow, striped barber-pole band. Where did he get his power? From his long sideburns, his salesman features, from his tie which, loosened in the taxi, hung from his neck like the whistle of a coach, from his spongy composition soles, from his being thirty-seven and fit, it must appear, as a fiddle, in the prime of his life. From his loss, his primogenitive aspect. People would sympathize, say they loved his dad. That would be their word; his, in that outfit, would be Pop.

“The legalities,” he said, “don’t start until Pop’s body’s in the ground. You don’t even think of the legalities till the rabbi goes home. I’ve talked on long-distance telephones. I haven’t slept. I’ve been in the sky in airplanes.” He rubbed his face, hoping she would pick up the rasp of stubble, hoping his beard had darkened. “I haven’t shaved.” The cab had not been air-conditioned. A grand ring of sweat stained the underarms of his suit, round and wide as pawprints. “I need a shower.” Potency spilled from his disreputable circumstances, his fleshy thighed, big-assed good looks, like an M.C.’s in a night club. “The legalities begin when no one’s crying. Give me the key.”

She gave it to him. He went back to South Tower.

The lobby was gorgeous, red flock on the walls, narrow smoked mirrors ceiling-to-floor, black low leather-and-chrome sofas and chairs, short glass tables on thick carpet the color of blood. There were tubular lamps and a huge chandelier with staggered, concentric rings of tiny bulbs that reminded him of the one on The Glen Campbell Goodtime Comedy Hour. It was astonishing after the low-rent government housing impression he’d had from the outside. It was as if he’d been admitted to some plush speakeasy or tasty Mafioso palace buried in warehouse gut. He put it down to security, inconspicuous consumption, and rode up to his father’s floor, where the corridors swept back from the elevator at modest angles like the wings on airplanes and the red flock had been replaced by gold.

He let himself into 15E. “Hello?” No one was there. It had not really occurred to him that he would be alone in the apartment. He removed his jacket and placed it across the back of a chair, deciding that for the time being he would confine himself to the living room. He sat, prim as a guest asked to wait on the couch, then rose and walked to the enormous television and turned it on. It was color. The Saturday morning cartoon shows looked splendid, everything in bright, solid colors like plastic sculpture in museums. He watched for twenty minutes, expecting the phone to ring. Once it did and he turned the volume down guiltily, but it was a wrong number. He jabbed off the set.

Judging by the living room, his father’s apartment was not what he expected. There were no pictures of his mother or himself, and he recognized no pieces from the old place. Everything was new and expensive and in marvelous taste, the apartment of a bachelor twenty years younger than his father (himself if he could have afforded it?) or of a couple without children. The lobby could have served as a model. Leather, chrome, glass. Swedish stuff, Finnish, the low geometry of high countries. Elsewhere there might be pieces he’d recognize, but he couldn’t leave the living room. He thought his father might still be in the bedroom.

In an hour he went into the kitchen. Brown built-ins, a refrigerator, a hooded electric stove, a line of cupboards — everything the color of new shoes. He took ice water from the spigot on the refrigerator by putting his mouth directly under the faucet. Leaving the kitchen he investigated the rest of the apartment, the rooms falling to him quickly now, like towns at the close of a war. Here and there were things he recognized, though almost nothing from the time he still lived with his parents; just things he’d seen on visits when, first sonless, then wifeless, his father had made his subsequent moves.

Only the spare bedroom was the same, furnished with the twin beds and blond furniture of his high school days. Under the thick glass on his desk were photographs of himself and of friends whose names he’d forgotten, and the only picture in the entire apartment of his mother. He was not moved, either by the photos — he recognized them all, remembered when they’d been taken, how he’d felt posing; no time had passed; how could he be moved? — or by the preserved quality of his old room, his though he’d never spent a single night in it or even seen it before he walked into it just now for the first time.

In his father’s room the bed was empty, carefully made, high as a chest of drawers under its tufted spread and fluffed pillows. Another television, a black Sony with a dark screen, sat on a chrome stand facing it. Under so well made a bed the linen would be smooth and fresh. (Where were the neighbors who’d removed the dead man’s sheets and pillowcases and punched his pillows like a bread dough?) On impulse he disturbed one corner of the bedspread near the headboard. The pillowcase was a print, a single enormous Audubon bluejay. He drew the spread the rest of the way down and raised the blanket: another bluejay, big on the king-size bed as a pony. He touched the percale, smooth as paper in a dictionary. My God, he thought, this sheet must cost four hundred dollars. He rushed back to the spare bedroom — his room — and pulled the spread back from one of the twin beds. White, muslin, it did not seem even to have been ironed. Naked, he would have bruised his body on it. Carefully he re-tucked both the beds, thinking of his Egyptian father, pharaohed up to the eyes in treasure. It seemed a shame he had to be interred elsewhere. Then he recalled that he didn’t know where they had taken the body.

Though he had grown up in Chicago he’d lived remarkably free of death — the blessing of a small family — and couldn’t think of the name of a single Jewish cemetery. His mother had died when he was on a lecture tour eight years before. She’d been visiting her sister who still had a bungalow in New Jersey, and was buried in the family plot in Hackensack, literally at her parents’ feet. His father had gotten his itinerary from his agent (those were the good old days; he’d had an agent, an itinerary) and called him in Salt Lake City, and he’d flown to Newark, flown to his mother’s death as he’d flown to his father’s. His maiden aunt had been willing, even anxious, to surrender her rights in her sister, the notion that the man had lain with her sister exalting his father and making her fear him. It was his father who’d insisted on Hackensack. “Someone would have to sit with her in the baggage car. Don’t ask me to do that. I’d throw myself under the wheels.” If it occurred to them that Marshall might sit with his mother, they hadn’t said anything. “I’ll come back,” his father promised, “when it’s my time I’ll come back to be with her.” Irritated, he used the absence of his mother’s photographs to unburden himself of the pledge his father had made and which he had only just now remembered.

He went to the extension phone in his father’s bedroom expecting to find a space on the dial for the office or even a “7” for room service, but it was an ordinary phone. (Though actually it wasn’t. It was a custom job in a felt-lined box like a case for dueling pistols. If its lid hadn’t been raised he would never have noticed it.) He had to hunt around for a directory (he found it in an antique sword case, a rebuilt McCormack Plaza phoenixy on the front cover) and look up the number of Harris Towers. A salesman told him that the girl he had spoken to and who had promised to find out where they had taken his father had gone to lunch. Leaving the apartment, he went downstairs, the key to someone else’s apartment in his pocket somehow reassuring and making him feel lucky. He walked four blocks to a drugstore and looked up the details of his father’s burial in the Tribune.

The body was at Pfizer’s Funeral Home in a coffin the color of the appliances in his father’s kitchen. The coffin was open and he saw that his father had grown long hair, sideburns, a mustache. The effect — the shirt beneath his Edwardian blazer was a wallpaper print, his tie, cut from the same cloth, almost invisible against it — was oddly healthy, obscurely powerful. “It sounds crazy,” a director whispered, “but hippies make a terrific appearance in a box.” It was true; his father seemed to glow. He looked marvelous, solider in death than in life, though Marshall hadn’t seen him since he’d grown his new hair and bought his new wardrobe.

He felt no particular grief, only a curious letdown, and wanted to explore this. The only person there he knew was Joe Cane, a business associate of his father. “Don’t get me wrong,” Marshall said. They had gone outside to smoke. “I loved him a lot. I’m fucked up like a jigsaw puzzle, but he had nothing to do with that. My life is largely unexamined, Joe, but he was a sensible guy. He didn’t give me bad times. And he gave me good advice. He was against my going into the lecture business. Even in my senior year at college, I was pulling three hundred, sometimes four hundred bucks for a lecture. It started as a gag, you know. I wrote a parody of a travel lecture—‘Mysterious Minneapolis’—and my roommate sent a copy of it to this bureau. That’s how I first got started with them. Pop came up when I did it in St. Paul and laughed harder than anybody, but afterwards he told me not to count on it.”

“He should never have retired,” Cane said, a tiny well-dressed man who looked the same now as he had in the Forties. Cane reminded Marshall of Roosevelt. Thinner, he had the old President’s handsome sobriety and looked always a little worried. Marshall respected him. He appeared a talisman of responsibility and competence. The manager of the Chicago office of the firm for which his father traveled, he had always seemed mysterious. He had lived in an orphanage until he was seventeen. (Cane was not his name, Joe wasn’t. He had become that person — this was the mystery — out of some other person.) He was totally self-made. There were Book-of-the-Month Club selections in his house and on the desk in his office.

“He was tired out, Joe. The road exhausted him.”

“He could have worked in the office. He could have written his own ticket.”

“He was a salesman.”

“He could have sold from the office. The costume jewelry business isn’t what it was, but buyers still come to Chicago. He could have hired college boys to work his territory and seen the buyers here. He could have used the telephone more. Lots of men do it.”

“I don’t know.”

“It was jealousy. He didn’t want anybody to think he was working for me. He couldn’t stand me. I loved Phil, but he always had a resentment against me.”

“That’s silly. Why would he be jealous? He was a very dynamic man.”

“He was the Wabash Cannonball, but he was jealous. Always. I was an executive and he was a salesman. I didn’t make more money. He made more money, though I got more benefits. As an executive I was entitled to extra stock options. He resented that.”

“He loved being a salesman.”

“He hated it. He wanted his own desk in his own office and his own secretary, not somebody from the typing pool. He wanted ceremony. When the firm took over the seventh floor of the Great Northern Building I worked my can off to get him that office. New York wanted the space for a showroom. He thought it was me blocking him.”

“Jesus, Joe, please don’t talk this way about him. You make him sound small.”

“Small? He was Yellowstone National Park. Only pipsqueaks like me have decorum and character. Men like Phil are mad and petty and great.”

“He was fond of you.”

“No. I was fond of him, but he always bad-mouthed me to the New York people. He despised me. May he rest.”

“Stick with me, please, Joe. Don’t go home early. Get me over the hurdles tonight when his friends show up. Some of them will be people from the South Side and I won’t know them anymore. The rest I won’t ever have seen. It’s going to be rough.”

But there were no hurdles. It was not rough, not at least in the sense he’d anticipated. If he felt no grief, then neither did anyone else. They came to the chapel — not a big crowd, but respectable — stood shyly at the coffin for a few moments and then went back to the outer rooms. He recognized many of them, men and women his parents had played cards with when he was a child, and was surprised at his ability to recall their names. When they offered their condolences he offered their names. “Thanks, Rose. Thank you, Jerry. It was good of you to come, Maxine. I was very sorry to hear about Arnold.” Their first names odd in his mouth and vaguely forbidden (he’d known them as a child), granting him — Ph.D. manqué, ex-lecturer from the ex-lecture circuit, a man with a large scrapbook almost filled, a man with clippings — a sense of graciousness, a snug sensation of being their host.

The new people, friends his father had made at the condominium, moved with a sort of nervous bustle, more distraught then the others because they had known him less long and more recently. They were the ones who told him that they’d seen him only last Tuesday or Thursday and that he’d seemed fine, tiptop, that he’d done five laps of the pool and hadn’t been a bit winded, that they were supposed to play bridge together next week, that they had had a date to go to a restaurant, that he was talking about a trip to Europe, that he was thinking about getting a part-time job. But even these neighbors could register only surprise at sudden, generalized death, their anecdotes about his last days and last plans unremarkable, borrowing their importance from the irony built into all death. He realized that no one was very unhappy, and indeed it developed that several of them — from both camps — had come merely to explain that they would not be able to attend the funeral. His earlier sense of being their host deserted him, and he began to feel that had he been more impressive as a survivor he would somehow have focused their grief. His use of their names was lost on them, and even this, his single resource, was unavailable to him with the new people. He explained a little of this to Joe Cane, thanking him for coming and telling him he could leave now if he wanted. “Don’t think I want to steal my father’s show,” he said, “but it’s getting trivial. Nobody’s upset, just glum.”

Then the big shots came and the chapel cheered up. These were the officials from the condominium: the sales manager, Joe Colper; Shirley Fanon, the corporation’s lawyer; Sid Harris, the president himself. They had come together, three wide men in beautiful business suits and sharp shoes. They wore blocky paper yarmulkes which stood high on their heads and somehow gave them the appearance of cantors. They moved vigorous as a backfield in some subtle choreographed way that made it impossible to tell which was the leader. They came down the center aisle and took up positions at the coffin: Colper at the head, Fanon at the foot and Harris in the middle. They looked down on his father like fairies at cribside, and for a moment Marshall thought they would sing. No one approached them, though their celebrity had sparked something in the room, even among his father’s old friends. Even Preminger was excited. One of the neighbors told him who they were, but by then he knew; he’d heard his comforters’ murmurs, picked up their pleased, congratulatory whispers. “Wasn’t that nice?” one said, and his friend had answered, “Gentlemen.” It was a word others used too, the presence of the three bringing it out almost reflexively. Preminger wasn’t sold yet — he resented this queer gratitude, ubiquitous as pollen — but then they were upon him and he understood.

“Sid Harris,” Sid Harris said, and shoved a hard hand at him. “Nice to meet you.”

“Nice to meet you,” Preminger said, returning the pressure as best he could.

Harris frowned disapprovingly. “Not under these circumstances,” he said and dropped Preminger’s hand. “My associates,” he said, naming them.

“Sorry for your trouble,” Colper said.

“Condolences,” said Shirley Fanon and winked.

“Ditto, ditto. We’re all shook,” Harris said. “These things happen. What can I say? Terrible shock, et cetera, et cetera. Look, Marshall — it’s Marshall, right? — I’m not small-timing Pop’s death. He was a gentleman. Mike’s dead, I’m alive, you got me? Life goes on. You know what my rabbi says? ‘Fuck death. Live as if it don’t exist because it does.’”

“That’s some rabbi,” Preminger said.

“You’d love him. The Miracle Rabbi of the Chicago Condominiums. Sleeps in a little sukkah behind the swimming pool with the inner tubes, water toys and chlorine. Got himself a nice little setup in the filtration butke with the towels and the first-aid kit. What the fuck am I talking about? Fanon, you know?” Shirley Fanon shrugged. “Joe Colper?”

“What’s that, Boss?”

“What’s on my mind?”

“I just got here, Boss,” Colper said.

“Must be my grief. Hangs on like a summer cold.” He shook his head. “Got to pull myself together. Fanon, help me up off the floor. Colper, take one arm. Marshall, kid, grab another.” He sat down at the front of the chief mourners’ bench and patted it, inviting Preminger to join him. When he held back, the other two moved in, hustling him toward Harris.

“Hey,” he protested, “what is this? This is a memorial chapel. Will you have some respect?” Even to him it sounded as if he were offering them refreshment.

“Fellows, the game’s up,” Harris said. “He knows who we are.”

“The Jewish Mafia,” Shirley Fanon said.

“The Kosher Nostra,” said Joe Colper.

Preminger looked around desperately. They weren’t bothering to keep their voices down. His father’s old friends and the people from the condominium were taking it all in. Incredibly, they seemed to approve. He appealed to one man who earlier had claimed to have been very close to his father. The man shrugged. “The owners are clowns,” he said.

“Lehrman’s got our number,” Harris said. “Listen to Lehrman.”

“They’re tummlers.”

“A barrel of monkeys?” Harris asked.

“Sure,” Lehrman said, “you ought to be on the stage.”

“We’re better off,” Harris, Fanon and Colper all said together.

“Come on,” Preminger said, “what right have you got to behave like this? You don’t know me. You think this shit is charming? That nerve and craziness makes you lovable? What an incredible slant you three have on yourselves. I haven’t been in my father’s life for years, but that’s him dead up there. He grew long hair and bought new clothes and I didn’t know about it. We told each other old stuff on the long distance and sent each other shirts on our birthdays. He changed his furniture and went Swedish modern and I sat like a schmuck in a rooming house and lived like a recessive gene, but—”

“That’s right,” Harris said cheerfully, “let it all out. Cry.”

“Go to hell,” Preminger said.

“But?” Shirley Fanon reminded him.

“But it’s a death. I’m not going to stand by while you turn it into the cheap heroics of personality.” He stared at Harris. “Are you married?” he asked.

“Who ain’t married?”

Preminger closed his eyes. “Your wife is growing cancer,” he said. “She’s a cancer garden. I give her eight months.”

“Hey, that’s pretty outrageous,” one of the neighbors said.

“Name of the game,” Preminger said calmly. “That’s what this gangster is up to. It’s grandstanding from Rod Steiger pictures, it’s ethnic crap art.”

“Go, go,” Harris said.

“Go, go screw yourself.” He turned to the people from the condominium who had pressed forward to hear. “What, you think it’s hard? This kind of talk? You think it’s hard to do? It’s easy. It makes itself up as you go along. You think it’s conversation? It’s dialogue. Conversation is hard. I don’t do conversation. Like him”—he jerked his thumb toward Harris—“I don’t even feel much of this.”

“Please,” Harris said, rising, “please, neighbors, give us some room. The man’s right. Say your last goodbyes to Phil while I apologize to his son.” They drifted off, dissolving like extras in movies told to move on by a cop. He sat down wearily and turned to Preminger. “Will you take back what you said about my wife?” he asked softly.

“Oh, please,” Preminger said.

“Will you take back what you said about my wife? She ain’t in it.”

“All right,” Preminger told him, sitting down. “I take it back.”

“You hit the nail on the head,” Harris said. “Didn’t he hit the nail on the head, Joe? Shirley, don’t you think he…Gee, there I go again. But you know something? I’m sick and tired of showing off for these people. The bastards ain’t ever satisfied. I put in a shuffleboard, a pool, a solarium. I gave them a party room. They wanted a sauna and I got it for them. They walk around with my hot splinters in their ass. There’s a master antenna on the roof you can pull in Milwaukee it looks like a picture in National Geographic. Energy, energy — they worship it in other people. Momzers. And me, I’ve got no character. I give ’em what they want. I’m sorry I leaned on you.”

“We were both at fault.”

Harris sighed. “I’ll never forgive myself.”

“Forget it.”

“No. There’s such a thing as a coffin courtesy. I’m a grown man. I haven’t even said basic stuff like if there’s anything I can do, anything at all, don’t hesitate to ask.”

“Thank you,” Preminger said, “it’s kind of you to offer, but really there’s nothing.”

“That’s it, that’s it,” Harris said. “Will you pray with me?” he asked suddenly.

“Pray?” Startled, Marshall started to rise but Harris restrained him.

“No, no,” he said, “We don’t have to get on our knees. We’ll do it right here on the bench. Everything dignified and comfortable, everything easy.”

“Hey, listen—”

“Hey, listen,” Harris prayed. “Your servants may not always understand Your timing, God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Sometimes it might seem unfortunate, even perverse. Was there a real need, for example, to take Philly Preminger, a guy in the prime? How old could the man have been? Fifty-eight, fifty-nine? With penicillin and wonder drugs that’s a kid, a babe. Was there any call to strike down such a guy? You, who gave him sleek hair, who grew his sideburns and encouraged his mustache, who blessed him with taste in shirts, shoes, bellbottoms and turtlenecks, you couldn’t also have given him a stronger heart? Why did you make the chosen people so frail, oh God, give them Achilles heels in their chromosomes, set them up as patsies for cholesterol and Buerger’s disease, hit them with bad circulation and a sweet tooth for lox? You could have made us hard blond goyim, but no, not You.”

“Look here—”

“Look here, oh Lord,” Harris prayed, “the bereaved kid here wants to know. Didn’t you owe his daddy the courtesy of a tiny warning attack, a mild stroke, say, just enough to cut down on the grease and kiss off the cigarettes? Here’s a man not sixty years old and retired three years and in his condominium it couldn’t be two — I can get the exact figures for You when I get back to the office—a guy who put his deposit down months before we dug the first spadeful for the foundation, and got his apartment fixed up nice, just the way he wanted it, proud as a bride when the deliveries came, the American of Martinsville, the Swedish of Malmö, who made new friends, the life of the party poolside, a cynosure of the sauna and a gift to the dollies, the widows of Chicago’s North Side—who’ll have plenty to say to You themselves, I’ll bet, once their eyes are dry and they make sense of what’s hit them—and You knock him down like a tenpin, You make him like a difficult spare. Lead kindly light, amen.” He turned, beaming, to Preminger. “Gimme that old time religion,” he said. “We got business. You got the will, Shirley?”

The lawyer patted his breast pocket.

“You were my father’s lawyer?”

Fanon patted it a second time.

“Don’t keep us in suspense,” Harris said. He winked at Preminger. “That’s how he wins his cases. The juries eat it up.”

Fanon reached inside his jacket, pulled out a legal document bound in blue paper. Unfolding it, he took out his glasses, put them on and began to move his lips rapidly, making no sound. “The reading of the will,” Joe Colper whispered. Fanon wet his thumb and flipped the page, continuing to read to himself. He looked like a man davening, and it seemed the most orthodox thing that had happened that evening.

When Fanon finished, he folded the paper and placed it back inside his jacket pocket.

“Well?” Harris said.

“The boy gets the condominium,” Fanon said.

“Airtight?”

“Like a coffee can.”

“Will it stand up in court?”

“Like a little soldier.”

“What else?”

“Nothing else.”

“Let me see that,” Marshall said.

The lawyer handed the will over to him. It was very short, a page and a half and most of that merely concerned with authenticating itself. Marshall could see that Fanon was right. He got the condominium and the furnishings. It was his father’s signature. “I don’t understand,” he said. “What about the rest of the estate?”

“There isn’t any rest of the estate.”

“Well, there must be. Insurance policies, stocks. My father was very active in the market.”

They looked at him and smiled. “Nope. He cashed his policies. He sold his stocks.”

“I figured about a hundred twenty-five thousand. I was being conservative.”

Joe Colper put his arm on Preminger’s shoulder. “The apartment was forty-five thou. He paid cash. The furnishings must have cost another twenty.”

“The man hadn’t worked for three years,” Fanon said. “Say his food and incidentals cost him ten a year. He had some tastes, your old man. That’s ninety-five.”

“I figured one hundred twenty-five thousand. That still leaves thirty thousand.”

Colper and Fanon shrugged. “Tell him,” Harris said, “about maintenance.”

“Maintenance?”

“That’s the thing sticks in their throat,” Colper said.

“He bought a condominium from us,” Fanon said. “Where does it say we sold him an elevator?”

“A carpeted lobby,” Colper said.

“Game rooms, party rooms, a heated pool, central air conditioning,” Fanon said.

“These are ‘extras,’ ” Colper told him.

“Maintenance is three hundred a month,” Fanon said.

“Okay,” said Harris, “here’s the story. I hate to trouble you with details at a terrible time like this, but we’ve got to face facts. Time and the hour runs through the roughest day. He was behind in the maintenance when he passed. He was broke. I never saw such a guy for spending dough. And he was so cautious when I first knew him. Prudent. Wouldn’t you say prudent, Shirley?”

“Very prudent.”

“But toward the last — well, toward the last he spent and spent. Call me a cab, keep the change.”

“A real sport,” Colper said.

“There was drunken sailor in him.”

Marshall, who melted when he heard a lowdown, melted. It was as if they’d been up all night together. He felt grotty, intimate, like a man with a shirttail loose at a poker table. “I sound terrible,” he said. “I’m not greedy. I’m not a greedy person. I didn’t have expectations, I never lived as if I was coming into dough. You sprung this will on me. Naturally I’m surprised.”

“Sure,” Harris said, “naturally you’re surprised. You get a shot like this you fall back on your instincts. Inside every fat man there’s a wolf, there’s a buzzard, there’s a chicken hawk.”

“That’s human nature,” Joe Colper said.

“It’s why logic was invented,” his father’s lawyer said, “to tame surprise and make the world consecutive.”

“We understand your…lapse,” Harris said, “Shit, sonny—”

“I’m thirty-seven.”

“Happy birthday. Shit, sonny, I’m your uncle, I like you. Come home and I’ll take you to the ball game and get you a hot dog. Listen, there isn’t a single one of us who wouldn’t give his eyeteeth to behave like you just did. We’re not grand characters, we ain’t angelfaces. Petty hits us where we live. Let go, relax. What a kick it would be to let the other guy pick up the check in a restaurant! Keep your hands in your pockets, it’s cold out. Sit still. What are you reaching around like a fucking contortionist to pay the other guy’s toll at the bridge? I’ll give you a tip: don’t tip. You know the guy who’s got it made? The creep in the movies who plays up to the uncle because he thinks there might be an extra buck in the till for him when the old bastard croaks. So don’t apologize to us for your character. When Counselor Fanon laid the will on you and you gave us that ‘Let me see that’ and that ‘What about the rest of the estate?’ I was proud of you. Did you see him, Joe? Shirley? Whining like a baby and his old man dead in the coffin not fifteen feet away.”

“Takes guts,” Colper said.

“I think we have a young man here who’s no hypocrite,” Shirley Fanon said.

“I’m not listening to this,” Marshall said, and fled to the front where his father’s coffin lay open. He looked inside; he might have been watching the sea from the deck of a ship.

“Gee,” Harris said, coming up beside him and looking down too, “that’s some tan.”

“The pool,” Fanon said.

“Maybe the pool, maybe the solarium,” Colper said.

“Anyway, the little extras that maintenance pays for,” Fanon said. “We’ll split the difference. He took advantage of all of them. He lived way up on the fifteenth floor and rode shit out of the elevator.”

“What do you want?” Marshall asked them.

“We didn’t hound him,” Harris said. “Don’t look at me reproachfully. That man lays there dead of his own accord. Voices weren’t raised. Nobody nagged him, nobody dunned. No threats were made, we never served a summons. Two times, maybe three, the gentleman’s letter went out over my signature, last names and misters.”

“ ‘We feel that you may have overlooked…’ ” Fanon said. “ ‘If you have already remitted, kindly disregard…’ ”

“Like a four flush was a piece of amnesia,” Colper said.

“Like he was an absent-minded professor.”

“We knew he was strapped,” Fanon said. “That every day the furniture truck came.”

“He owed seven months’ maintenance,” Harris said. “Two thousand one hundred dollars. But who’s counting at a time like this?”

“In a week it’ll be eight months,” Fanon said.

“Let’s walk away from the coffin, please,” Harris said. He put his hand on Marshall’s sleeve. “Appreciate my position, Mr. Preminger. Real estate’s involved here. Titles and certificates. A condominium’s a delicate thing. Speaking statutorily. Shirley’s the legal eagle. Explain to him, Shirl.”

Fanon told Preminger that though he would probably get clear title to the place, the will would have to be probated. He named the various steps in the procedure. It could take anywhere from nine months to a year. In the meanwhile the maintenance — which by law he wasn’t required to pay until he held clear title — would continue to build up. He could owe them almost six thousand dollars before the condominium was his.

“I’ll sell it. I’ll put it on the market,” Preminger said.

“Well, you can’t do that until the will’s been probated.”

“I’ll sublet.”

“You’d need dispensation from the court. The dockets are logjammed. Anyway, the money would have to go into escrow. You’d still be responsible for the three hundred every month.”

He didn’t have that kind of money.

They knew that. They suspected that. Why didn’t they do this then? Why didn’t they take out an option to buy the unit?

Harris broke in. “Give it to him straight. The heir here wants to hear lump sums.”

“We’ll give you six thousand dollars for an option,” Fanon said. This would wipe out his father’s debt, with enough left over to take care of the maintenance payments while the will was being probated. Then, when he had clear title, they would pay him fifty thousand dollars, less the six they had advanced on the option.

“What about the furnishings?”

“Well, that’s what the extra five thousand is for.”

“That stuff cost my father twenty.”

“Go sell it.” Harris said. “See what you’d get.”

“I’m getting screwed. It’s a ridiculous offer. You’re offering me fifty thousand for sixty-five thousand dollars’ worth of apartment, then taking back six thousand for maintenance.” It was true, but strangely he did not feel its truth. He had a sense of the awful depreciation in things. He understood — or rather, understood that there was no understanding — the crazy fluctuations in value. It was as if a spirit resided and moved in objects, tossing and turning, a precarious health in things, irregular, fluxy as pulse and temperature and the blood chemistries. The market went up and it went down. Rhetoric feebly tried to account for the unaccountable, but its arguments were always as whacky as the defenses of alchemy, elaborate as theories of assassination. Value’s laws were undiscoverable, undemonstrable finally, as the notion of life on distant planets. (When he was still lecturing, hadn’t he once paid a thousand a month for a cottage on Cape Cod which couldn’t have cost more than ten thousand to build? In those days, didn’t his own fees vary anywhere from one to three hundred dollars a night for the same lecture?) Perhaps nothing more than mood lay at the bottom of it all. They were cheating him, but there was nothing personal in it, and he did not feel badly used. He turned down their offer anyway.

Harris considered him evenly. “You owe me two thousand one hundred dollars. If you have already remitted, kindly disregard.”

“I’ll pay,” Preminger said.

Harris shrugged and took off his yarmulke.

“I’m moving in,” Preminger said. It hadn’t occurred to him till he said it. He knew his life was changed. “Mr. Fanon?”

“Yes?”

“Were you the one who called me?”

Fanon nodded.

“Did you make these funeral arrangements?”

“That’s right.”

“Another two thousand?”

“More like three.”

“I’ll pay,” he said. “I’ll pay whatever I’m supposed to.” He felt valetudinarian. A graceful lassitude. All he wanted was to be in bed in his father’s apartment. Thank God, he thought, he had the key. They would have to kill him to take it from him. His life was altered. Later he would make the arrangements. Everything would go smoothly. A life like his, even an altered one, could be lived in Montana or in Chicago. It made no difference.

A limousine called for him on Sunday and took him, the only passenger, to the chapel. Then he rode alone in it to the cemetery. For a time he tried to speak to the driver, miles forward of him in the strange car, but the man’s perfect manners and funereal deference made it difficult. Preminger turned oddly condolent by the man’s performance, attempted to reassure him and said a strange thing: “It’s all right. I’m not tumbled by grief. My father and I weren’t close these last years. I’m from out of town. Someone else made these arrangements. I’m not overcome or anything.”

“You don’t know what you are,” the driver answered.

So instead of talking he took stock of the appointments in the Cadillac, the individual air-conditioning controls, the electric windows and a panel in the door beside him that slid back to reveal a cigar lighter. There were three separate reading lights in the back. What was curious about luxury was the low opinion it gave you of yourself because you had not anticipated your needs as cleverly as people who did not even know you. He could not get used to the stern ideals manifest in the car’s appointments. This is what some people expect, he thought, and felt depressed not only because he did not expect these things himself but because he could not think of anyone he knew who did. The driver, casually using the strange gauges and controls which to Preminger, spying them from the distant back seat, were as complicated as instruments in remote technologies, seemed unconscious of the car. They could have been riding in a ’58 Chevy.

Then he knew what was so awful. How comfortable he was — as if master upholsterers had taken his measure, fitting the car to him more perfectly than any chair he’d ever sat in. The climate was equally perfect, post-card temperature, the low humidity of deep sleep. Subtle adjustments had been made for his clothing, all that he carried in his pockets, where his hair thinned revealing scalp, environment molding itself to him, to the skin of his wrists and his ankles within their light sheath of stocking, to his toes in their woody envelope of shoe. It was as if his chemistry were known, published like secret papers. Someone had a fix on him. Though they rode in silence, the sounds of the thick traffic outside velvetized to mellow plips and hisses, he felt seduced by arguments. He could literally have ridden like this forever. He wanted never to reach the cemetery, always to follow his father’s hearse through the traffic of the world, the limousine’s headlights shining in broad day, a signal, right of way theirs like something constitutional.

On the way back his mood shifted, and he struggled to recover it, feeling nostalgia for that hour’s ride to the cemetery. When the driver opened his door in the driveway of South Tower he told Preminger to wait — it was almost a command — and unlocked the trunk of the car. “This is for you,” he said, extending a manila envelope. “The deed to the plot’s in there, and the death certificate and contract with the cemetery. Wait a minute.” He walked behind the car again. “Here’s your yahrzeit, here’s your bench.” He handed Marshall a jelly glass of wax gray as old snow. A tip of wick grew like a poor plant through the surface of the wax. Then he gave him a sort of cardboard bench.

“What’s this?”

“For sitting shivah,” the driver said.

Marshall took the bench and held it up. It was very light. He could see notches marked A and B, dotted lines, a legend that said FOLD HERE. A sort of wood grain was printed on one surface of the cardboard like the corky flecks on a cigarette filter. “It’s paper,” he said indignantly.

“Low center of gravity,” the driver said. “It’ll support three hundred pounds.”

Upstairs he placed the bench beside the television set in the living room, across from his father’s leather couch, and put the yahrzeit candle unlit on top of the refrigerator, where he remembered seeing one when his parents mourned. He wondered if he intended to sit shivah.

Someone knocked. A woman stood at the front door in a long housecoat, holding a bowl of water. “I apologize,” she said breathlessly. “This should have been outside the door when you got back from the cemetery.”

“What is it?”

“You wash your hands. You’re supposed to do it before you go in the house. It’s just a ceremony, it’s only a ritual,” she said, excusing either him for not knowing or herself for bringing it too late. She held the bowl out to him. “Just splash your hands. To tell you the truth, I need the bowl back.” He dipped his hands in the water. “I’ll see you later,” she said.

Back in the apartment he sat down on the low bench, his knees as high as his chest in a vague gynecological displacement. All around him his father’s new furniture glowed seductively. He thought of himself as bereft, shipwrecked, settled at sea on a spar, or on — at last — the desert island of his propositions. He had brought nothing with him; he’d had nothing to bring. Such speculations as those in his lecture were no game (he would amend the lecture), but the dream inventory of the already abandoned. What such people did to pass time, scheduling desires like trains, had somehow filtered down, returned like bottles to civilization. Perhaps he thought as criminals thought, longing out like cards on the table, his lists the ordered priorities of such fellows, the idle bookkeeping of the shitty condition.

Yet even he had options. He could quit his bench, turn the place back into the good hotel it had been the night before — or even accept sixty-two cents on the dollar and get out entirely. Or try for more. (Like all ultimatums and binds, the management’s was riddled with loopholes.) How free the will! Till the moment of death how open-ended a man’s life! It was at last astonishing that there was so much suffering, so little revenge. Sit shivah? Why, he should stand it tiptoe, climb all over it. He was in his father’s skin now, plunging into Pop’s deepest furniture, but all along the attraction had been that it was someone else’s, that he’d been granted the dearest opportunity of his life — to quit it, a suicide who lived to tell the tale. (But to whom?) Wrapping himself in another’s life as a child rolls himself in blankets or crawls beneath beds to alter geography. But where was everybody? When would the doorbell ring?

Answering his wish, as if his new freedom brought with it special powers, it actually did ring. Just before he opened the door he pulled off his shoes, remembering that he was supposed to mourn in stockinged feet, and rushed to ignite the yahrzeit. Dressed now, the woman who had brought him the bowl was standing there. “Are you alone?”

“Yes.”

“I have to speak with you.”

“Come in.”

Closing the door behind her, she stepped into the apartment and looked around. “I’m sorry about your father,” she said nervously. Preminger nodded solemnly. Though he’d never seen her before her brief errand, there was something familiar about her. A large woman in perhaps her early forties, she wore her hair in a weighty golden beehive and seemed as imposing as the hostess in a restaurant, a woman men kidded warily. He could see her with big menus in her hand and wondered if she was a widow. She was the age of the men and women who’d been his parents’ friends when he was in high school, in that long-gone postwar prime time when his father earned more than he ever had before or since, when his parents had begun to take vacations in the winter — Miami, cruises to the Caribbean, others that grazed South America’s long coast, nibbling Caracas, Tobago, Cayenne. Seeing this woman, he recalled those trips, how proud he’d been of his parents, how proud of the Philco console television and Webcor wire recorder and furniture and fur and stock brochures that had poured into their home in those days, a high tide of goods and services, a full-time maid and a second car, his father’s custom suits, his mother’s diamonds lifted from their settings and turned into elaborate cocktail rings like the tropical headgear of chorus girls in reviews. It was at this time that there had begun to appear new friends, this woman’s age, people met on cruises, in Florida, at “affairs” to which his parents had eagerly gone, bar mitzvahs and weddings — he’d seen the checks, for fifty or a hundred dollars, made out to the sons and daughters of their new friends, children they’d never met — and dinner dances where his father pledged two or three hundred whatever the cause. Proud of all the checks his father wrote, of all the charities to which they subscribed — to fight rare diseases, to support interfaith schools, the Haganah, the Red Cross, Schweitzer, Boys Town, the Fund for the Rosenbergs, the Olympic Games Committee, the Democratic Party and Community Chest — proud of his parents’ whimsical generosity that bespoke no philosophy save the satisfaction of any need, the payment of any demand.

Indeed, in a curious way he associated their new prosperity (they’d always been prosperous but this was something else) with the appearance of these new friends, a cadre of big handsome men in glowing custom suits, white-on-white shirts. He recalled the monograms stitched into their breast pockets exposed at poker tables, the elaborate thin blue calligraphy closing in on itself in sweeping strokes and loops, their thriving wives. (Had people ever been that happy?) Liquor was served as once fruit had been (though fruit was still served, great overflowing bowls on the coffee and end tables), and coffee cakes baked to order like birthday cakes, and the coffee itself from tall, glistening electric warmers, from Silex and Chemex — it was coffee’s Industrial Revolution — a whole range of new and marvelous machines. Prouder still of his parents’ hospitality, a streak of it in them a mile wide, that sent him on a hundred errands, around the corner, down to the drugstore to lay in when they’d run out five hundred aspirin for the headache of a single guest, that authorized his rare use of the car to fetch their friends and even their friends’ friends from airports and train stations. Where had that hospitality, in his parents so punctilious, gone in him? To what had it been reduced? As the woman stood before him now he could think of nothing so much as of where he would get fruits to give her, coffee, luscious cake to swallow. He felt shamed, consternated, like someone caught out in farce, wondering in these first seconds how he could stall her while he phoned delicatessens, sent messages to appetizer shops to bring back treats.

He threw himself upon her mercy.

“I’ve nothing to serve you.”

“I’m on Weight Watchers.”

“I don’t even know if there’s bouillon. I haven’t been cooking.”

“It isn’t important,” she said. “At a time like this it’s us who should be doing for you.” Suddenly she moved forward and took him in her arms; then, astonishingly, this brisk woman of the earlier errand began to sob hysterically. By stepping forward she had reversed their roles. He pressed her against him, thinking, I can’t give her grapes, but I’ll stand here and let her hang on. Was this dignity, he wondered? The comforted comforting. Was he Ethel Kennedy reassuring a shaken Andy Williams, Coretta King grim and brave at the peace rallies?

“There, there,” he said.

Tall as himself, the woman buried her running nose in his ear. His ear was no tangerine, but surely this was hospitality of a sort too. She gripped him fiercely and moaned and he pressed her harder and patted her back and moved her hair with his hand, and before he knew it he had an erection. Could she feel it? He extricated himself gently. “I’m going back to my mourner’s bench,” he said. The woman blew her nose in her handkerchief and moved to the neutral corner of his father’s sofa. There she continued to sob, though more quietly now. He waited politely and thought, surprising himself, that this had been his first sexual contact in a long time. And with a woman who, though at the most only five or six years older than himself, was in his mind the physical and spiritual counterpart of those guests of his parents when he was in high school, and so through some trick of associative displacement was old enough to be his mother. He recalled how those women had pleased him, inspired his lusts, their laughter over cards overheard through his bedroom door open just a crack (concupiscent, their mah-jongg concentration in its sheer physical huddle; beneath the folding card table their stockinged knees would be touching) sending him signals like whores in daylight gossiping in kitchens or doing their nails, and he blushing simply to overhear recipes recited, as though those treats they prepared for their husbands were code for the exotic movements they made in their beds. He understood why they appealed to him, coming as they did into his parents’ lives with his father’s rising fortunes, their presence associated with the TV, and the new gadgets and the other merchandise. Perhaps his own low-level sexuality had to do with being broke, his hard-on — another odd displacement only now subsiding — with his being in his father’s house again. Which made him an Oedipus of the domestic for whom jealous of his father’s place meant just that: place.

“May we speak?” she asked.

“Of course.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It was such a shock to all your father’s neighbors, to all his…friends.”

He nodded gravely, hoping to say something that would spark additional condolences, suddenly needing to hear them, to encourage the proper — all forms of regret were proper, always in season, like basic black — as a necessary aspect of his position, not hiding in commonplaces so much as seeking circuits in them.

He cleared his throat and began.

“Well, one thing — he certainly lived a full life.”

“Fifty-nine? Fifty-nine is a full life?”

“I mean he lived life to the brim. Each day was a new possibility. He got pleasure out of things. He never lost his curiosity about life. That’s why he retired young, I think. To give himself a chance to feel new things. Always to keep on discovering, keep on learning.”

“He didn’t know what to do with himself.”

“He took pleasure in the apartment. The way he fixed it up.”

“The bills beat his brains in.”

“He passed in his sleep,” he said. “Painlessly?” he added uncertainly.

“Who’s to know?” she said. “When your heart falls downstairs you probably feel it pretty good.”

“At least he couldn’t have suffered long,” Preminger said.

“He died alone. If you’re alone when something like that hits you, you get plenty scared.”

Out of commonplaces, Marshall shrugged and sat silently.

“I like to think,” she said finally, dropping her devil’s advocacy, “that at least his last months weren’t entirely all that terrible. There could have been a little sweetness. Toward the end. Frankly, that’s why I’m here.”

“I see.”

“Not the only reason, of course,” she added hurriedly. “If there’s anything I can do don’t hesitate to ask me.”

“That’s very kind, Mrs.—”

“Riker.”

“Mrs. Riker.” He’d been in Chicago two days and was beginning to understand that there were things people could help him with. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “there is something. I don’t have my car yet and don’t know the neighborhood. Do you drive? Maybe tomorrow or the next day you could take me around to the supermarket and I can lay in some supplies. I mean when you go shopping. I don’t want you to make a special trip. I could go with you, perhaps.”

“Perhaps,” she said coolly.

“It’s not important,” he said, “I just meant if you’re stopped at a red light in the lane nearest the sidewalk in a cloudburst and I happen by in the same direction with heavy bundles—”

“Listen,” she said, “there could be plenty of people here in a little while. Can we talk?”

He’d forgotten that she’d started to tell him something, and now he waited noncommittally for her to go on.

“I know your car isn’t with you,” she said. “You flew. Of course there’s nothing in the house. Your father ate in restaurants, but I don’t think it would be a good idea for us to go shopping together.”

“Oh?”

“Come on,” she said, “what ‘Oh?’ You know what I’m talking about. What was between your father and me was no big deal. It isn’t as if we slept together. It was a flirtation pure and simple. He was a lonely man and he liked to think we were having some sort of, I don’t know, adventure. It wasn’t vulgar. I didn’t encourage him. I didn’t lead him on. At no time did I lead him on,” she said positively. “You don’t believe me?” He just stared at her, his groin warming like toast. “All right,” she said, “let’s be frank. How much do you know?”

“How much?”

“You’ve been here two days. I’m the person who didn’t let you in yesterday. I believed you when you said you were Phil’s son. I didn’t want you in the apartment till I had a chance to get in here. But damn it, I couldn’t find the key.”

“I want the key returned,” Preminger said icily.

“This is crazy,” she said. “You’ve been alone here two days. A person looks around. He looks for papers, photographs.”

“My father is dead,” he told her. “Do you think I came to ransack the place?”

“No, of course not. This would be a sentimental thing. Look, how much do you know?”

“I don’t know anything,” Preminger said miserably.

“I appreciate your position,” she said. “Don’t think I don’t. Look, I’m sorry. There are letters. Did you happen to see them?”

“No.”

“Could I have a look around? I think they may be in his desk.”

“I’ll do it.”

“Could I come with you?”

“You think I’ll read them?”

“No, of course not. I could help you look. I know what they look like.”

“You mean you’d recognize your writing?”

“That’s right.” She grinned.

“Come on, then,” he said.

She went to the right drawer immediately and removed a pale blue box which she slipped into her handbag. Preminger decided she should suffer. “How do I know those are only your letters in there?”

“They are. He kept them in this box.”

“I’d have to see.”

“They’re innocent,” she said, “there’s nothing in them.”

“I’d have to see.” He spoke like a landlord, feeling the full weight of the law on his side. He could beat her up now, take the letters from her by force. They were his property, as much a part of his legacy as the furniture. She was trespassing, and if she refused to let him see them he could even kill her. He was stunningly in the right, stunningly protected.

“Hand over the box,” said the wise steward, “hand it over by the time I count three or I’ll take it away from you. I know my rights. I don’t even have to count three. Give me the box or I’ll hurt you bad.” She looked at him, shocked, and surrendered it. “You can have your letters back,” he said, “I won’t read them. But first I have to see if there’s anything that doesn’t belong to you.”

“They’re my letters,” she cried, “they’re the letters I wrote him.”

“That’s as may be. If so, you’ll get them back. But there may be wristwatches, jewelry. There may be fountain pens.”

“Paper clips,” she said, “rubber bands around the envelopes.”

It was so. He returned the letters.

“There’s nothing in them,” she said. “It’s a mountain out of a molehill. Read them if you want to.”

“That won’t be necessary.”

“But there’s nothing in them. Just my thoughts, only my thoughts.”

“It’s not important. I don’t have to know anything about it. My father was free to live his own life. You are.”

“I made you think terrible things,” she said, opening the box and pulling an envelope from the stack. “I’ll read one. Does this sound like we were having an affair? Does this sound dirty?”

“Please.”

“You son of a bitch, you listen to this.” She began to read rapidly. Everything was as she said. The letters were her thoughts, letters he might have written a cousin. He understood that on her part at least there was nothing between them. The subject never came up. What came up were the movies she’d seen, how she felt about the war news, where she thought the economy was headed, her hopes for a better world. It was incredible. They lived in the same building, on the same floor, yet the letters could have been written from one pen pal in Australia to another in Alaska.

She read through three of them before stopping. She showed him the formal signature: Evelyn Riker. “It was an outlet,” she cried. “It was only an outlet.”

Preminger was confused. “But you have his key.”

“He wanted me to have it. He insisted. That was his outlet, that a woman have a key to his apartment. Do you think I ever used it?”

“Jesus.”

“What was so terrible? As long as I had it he could fantasize that I might use it. It was innocent. We talked by the pool. I wrote him letters. He gave me his key. Nothing happened. I can’t help what people think.”

“I’m sorry I bullied you.”

“How could you know what to think?”

The doorbell rang.

“They thought we were mixed up together,” she said, looking toward the door.

“I better get that.”

“I wanted to be gone when they came. I handled it badly. I can’t think straight. In the letters I’m composed, organized. On my feet I can’t think straight. They shouldn’t see me here.”

“Do you want me to hide you?” Preminger asked. “If you want me to hide you I will.”

“There are only three floor plans. We know each other’s layouts. If the hall toilet was occupied they’d come use the one off the master bedroom and find me.”

“I don’t have to answer it. Then, after they’ve gone, you could wait a few minutes and slip out.”

“Answer it,” she said, “answer it. This is terrible for you. Phil dead and so much crazy excitement. Answer it or I’ll bust.” They left the bedroom together.

It was two men from Ashkenaz Delicatessen delivering trays, two enormous platters round as old shields.

“I didn’t order this stuff,” Preminger told them. One of the men, his tray before his belly like a cigarette girl, shrugged. “It’s a mistake,” Preminger insisted. “Who asked for all this?”

“It’s paid for, Mister,” the other one said, and again Preminger had a sudden sense of theater, of being on stage, his every step back from the advancing food a piece of alarmed comic business, of conventional blocking in farce. Crazily he felt an overwhelming fondness for the two men, their brusque man-in-the-street manners, their stolid cabby character; he found himself extrapolating their fidelity to their wives, their love of kids, their goofy loyalty to the White Sox. Putting himself in their shoes he thought he understood their surprise at the queer scene — Evelyn still suspiciously sniffing in the corner, his own bare feet, the box of letters, the odd look of the living room, lived in for two days but somehow not as mussed as it should have been, as though the real action had to be going on in the bedroom. Since they worked for a delicatessen they would even have taken in the significance of the vacant cardboard mourner’s bench. He had an urgent impulse to behave for them, to rectify their faulty impression. They would know his tourist condition, the unsavory quality of displaced person he gave off, and would have sniffed out all the willful bad timing of his lousy choices. He wanted these decent men in his corner, and would have bent over backwards to demonstrate his piety for them, as he always did in the face of another’s.

“It’s all right,” he said. “Good friends have sent it. We’re in mourning here. Deep sorrow has visited this place. I’m not able to go out. My father passed away suddenly. I’m his only son. Everything looks delicious.” The men remained impassive, and he wondered if he ought to tip them. No, he decided, guys like this can’t be bought. They asked for a ten-dollar deposit on the trays and left.

Evelyn had stopped whimpering; without his noticing she had performed some invisible toilet and reapplied make-up which had smeared when she was crying, her hair and clothes made neat and fresh, the hospital corners of appearance. Unrecovered himself — he still thought of their scene as a debauch — and sick of his sideburns and immodest flash (how should he dress? What was the apparel of his station? where could he get trousers with cuffs, white long-sleeved shirts, correct ties?) he sought to make amends.

Instead he made promises. “Harris wants to buy the place. He offers a ridiculous figure. But I’m not holding out for more. Even if I let him cheat me it would mean more money than I ever had in my life. The money isn’t in it. I mean to live here. I can do my dissertation on the kitchen table, use the place like an office. Most of the books I need are in Missoula, but I’m sending for them. Maybe I’ll fly out and drive back with the stuff. What I don’t have I can get from inter-library loan. As soon as this sitting shivah is over I’ll get organized. The job market’s terrible now — that’s why I’m taking my time. Actually, that might even work in my favor, be a blessing in disguise. If I don’t rush the thesis it could be publishable. Either way, conditions can’t stay like this forever; something has to give. Then, when I’ve got my doctorate I’ll get a job right here in Chicago. Northwestern, the U of C, Loyola, Marquette — there are plenty of good places. Roosevelt or even Wright Junior College. If I concentrate just on those I should be able to get something.”

“What do you owe me? Not even an explanation.”

He didn’t hear her. He was speaking for the record. “Then, when my life is normal again, when it’s routine and respectable, I’ll start looking around for a girl. We’ll get married, have a kid, live right here on the North Side. I appreciate that I’m starting late. Things are ass-backwards in my life, but I can catch up if I stick with it. I’ve got the house, the furniture, all I have to do is grow into what’s already here. Gee, I’m a pioneer in reverse.”

“I wish you every good luck. Like Pat O’Brien’s toast on television. ‘May the wind always be at your back.’ ” She giggled. “That would be like standing in a draft.”

He looked closely at her. “This sounds pretty lame to you? Like someone terminal making plans? People have no faith in other people’s second chances and fresh starts. Things by their nature seem irrevocable. Habit has a full nelson on us, we think. I hear some two-pack-a-day guy, a real cougher, say he’s quitting on New Year’s or on his birthday, or maybe he throws the cigarette away right in front of me, grinds it out in the ashtray and swears it’s his last, and I know he’s just kidding himself. How’s it any different for me? Is that what you think? What are you, an actuary? I know the odds. I want to tell you something. I’m pretty bouncy, I’ve come through before this, I’ve got powers of recuperation pinned on me like a kid’s mittens. I had a heart attack when I was thirty-three. It was a close shave and I thought I was a goner, but here I am.” He held up his hand. “Present.” She had jumped back when he raised his arm. “What did you think I was talking about, climbing Everest? Do I sound like William the Conqueror? Somebody who wants a screen test? I’m talking about ordinary life, H-O scale.”

“Listen,” she said, “I’d better get going.” She started toward the door.

“Gee, who’s going to help me eat all this stuff?”

“Oh, there’ll be plenty of people. I’ll come back later too.”

He stood in the doorway as she passed through and watched her as she walked down the hall. She was almost out of sight, at the point where the corridor turned, when he called after her.

“He gave you presents, didn’t he? He pissed it all away, my inheritance.”

Most of the food disappeared that evening, and all of it was gone by the following afternoon. It had been sent, it turned out, by the Harris Towers Emergency Fund Committee. One of his visitors explained that each month a portion of their maintenance money was shunted into the fund. His guests, who had after all paid for it, were not in the least shy about digging in. Only Preminger, aware of the back maintenance his father owed when he died, felt a freeloader, chewing guiltily and at last preferring to wait until his visitors left before eating anything more. Later he picked ravenously from the marvelous tiered wheel of corned beef and pastrami and sliced turkey laid out like a card trick, his fork flying, occasionally puncturing the bronze-colored cellophane which covered the meats. There were buckets of potato salad tucked away on the trays, logjams of pickles and cartons of coleslaw like a moist confetti. Some women had made coffee, serving it directly from Harris Towers Common Room urns, stainless steel and as large as the equipment in restaurants. They poured it into Styrofoam cups which they took from stacks that rose in high towers like Miami hotels.

Many of his callers were people he recognized neither from the chapel the evening before nor the funeral that morning, and he began to have a sense of the vast population that lived in Harris Towers. A few of them had peculiar names, queer portmanteau conversions of their children’s given names, now legally their own, and contrived in a strange incest from the small businesses and manufactories they had lent them to and had now, pleased with their oddly circular memorials, taken back. There was a Wil-Marg (belts) and a Freddy-Lou (blouses). There was a Rob-Roy. Some of the people were quite old, but not as many as he had expected, and though he was younger by several years than the youngest there, they seemed only a fraction of a generation up on him, and the deference these showed to those who were clearly along in years somehow reduced the difference in their ages even more.

He phrased this delicately as he could to one of his guests. “I know,” the man said, “most people think a place like this is some kind of Sun City, but I’ll tell you something. We haven’t even got an emergency room on the premises. A lot of condominiums do, you know. With a twenty-four-hour duty nurse, oxygen, the red telephones, everything. Harris Towers is a condominium with a difference. The clientele’s very active. Seventy-two percent of us are still in business.” Preminger, his retired father’s substitute, was glad he did not drag down the average. “We’ve got our Golden Agers, but so far they’re definitely in the minority. And very few vegetables, very few.” He touched Preminger’s arm. “Still,” he said, “glad to have you aboard. Always use new blood.”

In the next few days the weather turned very hot, and the central air conditioning, taxed to the limit, could barely cope. Taking his bench with him, Preminger moved his mourning out onto the balcony to try to catch a fresh breeze; there, facing southeast, he could see Chicago’s skyline, the tall apartments of Lake Shore Drive, downtown, Hancock’s startling skyscraper. But the heat was absurd, absolute. He stood at the railing and stared down into the cool turquoise of the swimming pool, then and there abandoning his shivah.

He had no bathing suit, of course, and walked to the shopping center to buy one. At the entrance to the pool the lifeguard turned him back. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but the pool is reserved for the exclusive use of residents and their guests.”

“I’m a resident.”

The boy took out a mimeographed list. “Your name, sir?”

“Marshall Preminger.”

“Oh,” he said, setting his list aside, “are you related to Mr. Preminger?”

“I’m his son. I live here now.”

“Sir, I’m not doubting your word, but you see in this building the residents all wear blue wristbands. Like the one that woman has on.” He pointed to a sort of strap, rather like a garter or the tag worn by patients in hospitals. Other people wore yellow or red bands, but everybody seemed to have one.

“I see other colors too.”

“The yellow bands are for guests. It’s a code. In this building the guests wear yellow. The red is for visiting residents from another building. In their own pools they might wear yellow bands and the guests would wear blue or red, and their guests yellow.”

“I don’t have a blue band.”

“Sir, all residents are issued a resident band plus two visiting resident and three guest bands.”

“I don’t have any.”

“Sir, your father…I was sorry to hear about what happened. I was teaching him to dive. I saw him do a terrific jack-knife, and the next day he was dead. Your father never swam without his blue band. Did you look around the apartment?” Preminger shook his head. “That might be a good idea. I’m sure you’ll find them.”

“I’m certain I will. I’ll look for them as soon as I go upstairs.”

“Sir,” the lifeguard said, “these rules were set up by the residents themselves. I haven’t the authority to suspend them.” He lowered his voice and spoke confidentially. “Sir, people are watching. You’re putting me on the spot. Could you look for the bands now? As a favor to me?”

Preminger shrugged, went back up to the apartment and searched high and low. When he couldn’t find them and called the office, they told him that no bands had been turned in. They suggested he look for different colored bands and swim as a visiting resident in one of the other pools. He returned to the pool and, brushing past the lifeguard, jumped into the water. He felt people staring at his naked wrists. It was as if he were skinny-dipping.

“Hey,” a fat woman called roughly. “Hey, you!” Preminger continued to swim. The heavy woman went over to the lifeguard and spoke to him and the lifeguard blew his whistle listlessly. Ignoring him, Preminger swam on. The lifeguard, looking sheepish, returned to his post, but the woman followed him and the boy, nodding miserably and setting his pith helmet on the seat beside him, jumped into the water and swam after Preminger.

“Please,” he said, “you’ll have to leave the pool, Mr. Preminger.”

“I can’t find the damned bands. I looked everywhere.”

“Sir,” he said, treading water powerfully and trying to keep his voice gentle, “I’m a college man. I depend on these people for tips. You can petition for a reissue. Why don’t you just get out now?”

“It’s too goddamn hot,” Preminger said stubbornly. “I’m not getting out.” He turned away from the boy and swam toward the deep end of the pool. Hearing clean, powerful chops behind him, he realized he was being followed. Though he hadn’t raced in years, he tried to get away, but in five strokes the lifeguard caught him.

“Sir,” he said, “I’m sorry,” and Preminger felt himself captured, the lifeguard’s strong arm across his chest and under his chin. It was an official Red Cross lifesaving hold and it was being used against him! Somehow this was more humiliating than anything that had yet happened, and he began to struggle furiously.

“That’s right, sir,” the boy whispered, “pretend you’re drowning.”

Preminger considered the proposition.

“Help,” he said weakly, “help, help.”

“That’s it,” the kid said softly, then louder, “it’s all right, sir, I’ve got you.” He felt himself towed sidestroke toward shore. He closed his eyes to avoid the stares of the others, then felt his body scrape bottom at the shallow end. The lifeguard helped him to stand, and with Preminger’s arm around the boy’s shoulder they climbed up the steps. When they were out of the pool he coughed a few times and the lifeguard pounded his back.

“Thanks,” Preminger said stiffly, “you saved my life. I’ll always be in your debt. How can I ever repay you?”

“Sir, forget it,” the kid shouted, “it’s my job. It’s all in a day’s work.” They shook hands formally and Preminger started back to the apartment.

He passed the fat woman. “Faker,” she hissed, “you weren’t drownding.”

“I was,” Preminger said, “I was drownding.”

Pride, he thought in the apartment afterwards, his chest still constricted from the encounter: the Preminger Curse. There was a floating fury in the low-keyed man, Preminger’s underground river. A health factor like a trick knee or a predisposition to allergy. Preminger the Proud, Seismological Preminger, quite simply blew up at a snub or humiliation. He exploded, bunched other men’s lapels in his fists, slapped faces like a duelist or slammed out incoherencies like a talker in tongues. Why did underwriters ignore it on forms? He took that as a snub!

It was a form of snub that had brought on his heart attack. He had gone to keep an appointment with his agent, in his creased, cuffed slacks and open shirt out of uniform beside the lightly summer suited men who rode with him in the elevator. When the operator shut the doors Preminger had sneezed, a tearing detonation too sudden for handkerchiefs, that had come on him like a mugger and left his nose looping viscous ropes like pulleys of mucus. The others made an alarmed nimbus of space around him, like dancers in night clubs for the turns of a virtuoso, while Preminger, panicking, palmed vast handfuls of the stuff and shoved it into his pockets as though it were money picked up in the street. Then the operator turned to him. He’s going to say “Gesundheit,” Preminger thought gratefully; he’s going to turn it into a joke. “What floor do you want?” the man said, and Preminger was on him, his anger bigger than the sneeze itself. “You never asked them, you son of a bitch. You ask them, you cheap fuckshit, you goddamn errand boy, you ass stink and cunt grease,” punching him about the head and shoulders with all his might, leaving sticky wisps of snot where he struck. His heart stopped him before the others could and he collapsed on the floor of the elevator.

Now he took his pulse — twenty-seven for fifteen seconds, four times twenty-seven’s a hundred eight — and swallowed two Valiums. Recognizing his vulnerability he could do nothing about it. On the mourner’s bench (despite the fact that he was no longer sitting shivah, he continued to go there as to a neutral corner) he cursed the lifeguard, wishing him dead, mutilated, cramped and drowning in his pool, electrocuted by a faulty underwater light. Only his anger, hair of the dog, calmed him, and gradually he steadied down. “I must be nuts,” he said aloud. “I’m a crazy.” He thought of himself in the elevator in the crummy pants and shirt, his shabby shoes, of pushing past the lifeguard to jump naked-wristed into the swimming pool. Jesus, he thought, if I don’t stop violating the dress codes I’m a dead man. Where do I get my fury? he wondered. What nutty notions of my character come on me? What is it with me? Where do I think I am — where three roads meet?

The phone rang. It was Evelyn Riker. She called to tell him that she’d found his father’s blue wristband. “It was wrapped around the letters in the box. I was upset or I would have noticed.”

“So you heard about that, did you?”

“I heard you almost drowned.”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll put it in an envelope and leave it for you at the office.”

“Yeah, thanks.”

When he hung up he went to the desk where she’d found the letters. He poked around in it, reaching deep into drawers, and pulled out the five missing red and yellow bands, plus a green band that the lifeguard had not told him about. “This must be the contraband,” he said.

The shivah had been broken. If he still used the mourner’s bench it was out of some vestigial need for the dramatically reflexive. Now he had a signature, a gesture, a theme, something associated with him, if invisibly. (No one saw him on it.) There was something inexplicably counterclockwise in him like a mysterious effect in physics, as personal and offbeat as a sailor hat indoors on a businessman. Watching the color TV from the mourner’s bench, his bare feet — for comfort now — extended, he thought that perhaps he could establish a Premingerian trend, a fad, a novelty, a first. He would bring mourner’s benches back into the living room. Though, again, no one saw him. He leaped to his feet if the bell rang, if there was a knock on the door, if the telephone sounded, and remained there several minutes after his visitor had gone or the phone had been replaced. What the occasional delivery person, the rare condolence caller from the South Side saw was the vacant bench itself, looking in its woody contact-paper like something left behind after a child’s log cabin has been struck. If the style caught on it would be brought back to the world misunderstood, like a Balkan mannerism or Asian idiom. To all eyes he seemed to steer clear, giving a wide berth to the bench.

Two nights following his little drama at the pool, the night his shivah would formally have ended had he not already suspended it, he had visitors. Seven men and four women, a jury of his peers manqué. Not individually familiar to him, though he thought he might have seen a few of them and one or two might even have been in his house, he recognized even before they spoke that they had come as a group. His behind still tingled with the austere, ghostly caress of the hard mourner’s bench and he felt a sort of mixed curiosity and low-intensity outrage at the sight of them. How dare these people, so patently a band (the fact that there were so many of them was a sure sign that they had not all been able to make it — and, oh, he thought, what low time is it in my life that I have taken to counting my guests? — who clearly would have had to have arranged this call, who didn’t look like brothers and sisters or husbands and wives or fathers and daughters), take it for granted, after their own elaborate arrangements with each other, that he would be there without first ringing up? Did they count him as he had counted them? Yes, that’s how it was. They had his number.

“Mr. Preminger, how do you do?” a man hidden behind the others in the corridor said. “We have not yet had the pleasure. I am Mr. Salmi, first president of H.T.R.A., the Harris Towers Residents Association.”

My God, Preminger thought, the Father of my Condominium!

“These good people — may we come in? — are associated with me on the Committee of Committees.” Preminger stood aside. “They are chairmen of the various committees that exist in our condominium to enrich the social and cultural life of the residents, make our bylaws, establish liaison between residents and management, and adjudicate complaints.”

“I found the wristbands,” Preminger said.

“Forgive if you will our vigilante aspect. We are here to welcome and invite. Normally, of course, Miriam — Mrs. Julius Schreiber — would have been by to do this, but your father died while Mrs. Schreiber was abroad.”

“She’s still there,” someone said.

“So this extraordinary convocation has no purpose other than to bid you welcome and to officially acknowledge the Towers’ sadness at Phil’s — your father’s — passing.”

“Hear hear.”

“You know,” Salmi said, “we don’t normally jump all over a new resident like this. Harris Towers is first of all our home; only secondly is it our community. I’m not going to talk a lot of Mickey Mouse to you. We don’t, for example, even have our own flag like a lot of the condominiums do. The management had one designed, but we voted not to fly it. The Stars and Stripes is good enough for us. Still, for many of the residents — I don’t except myself — Harris Towers has provided the first opportunity we’ve ever had to participate on a pragmatic, viable level in the shaping of the quality of the community life. I want to underscore that word ‘participate.’ I’ll be coming back to it, if you’ll bear with me, more than once tonight. May I sit down, Mr. Preminger — Marshall?”

Preminger waved him to a seat.

“Listen,” Salmi said, leaning forward, “we’ve got a piece of Chicago here that belongs to us. Do you gather my meaning? What we do with it isn’t anybody’s business but our own. I’m talking about the principle of anything between consenting adults — not on the smut level, you understand. This is a great principle, a great principle. One of the great ideas of Western Man. We can use this place as an ordinary bedroom complex — a home first, I said, you’ll remember — or we can reach out and touch our environment, shape it for good or ill. The choice is each individual’s to make, and the choice is ours. Boy oh boy, I must sure sound corny to you. I must sure sound like a fanatic. But wait, you’ll see. But what am I doing monopolizing? I said ‘participate,’ and I meant participate. Mr. Ed Eisner has the floor.”

“All I have to say,” said Mr. Eisner, “is I’ve been living here since the place opened. That was January of seventy, and I told my wife a new decade, a new tomorrow. I spoke better than I knew. I never had any desire to lead men. I’ve got an I.G.A. Big deal, it’s a small franchise supermarket, I’m a grocer. I still go to business, but I’m here to tell you that I’m more interested in this place than I ever was in my store. That’s my livelihood, but I’m telling the truth. I should have made this move years ago. I live to come home every night. Weekends are like a vacation for me. I don’t even want to go away anymore. If you ask me, Miriam Schreiber was nuts to go abroad. Not me. I’ve got a community. I don’t mean I have, I don’t mean me. I’m chairman of the Buildings and Grounds Committee. We serve for eighteen months, and my term was up this past June. Let me tell you something, I fought like hell to retain my chairmanship — promises, deals, even a little mudslinging, if you want to know. I said my opponent who happens to live in Center House wanted to use the fountain out front as a private lake. ‘A private lake’—what the hell does that mean? I sweated the election, I ate my heart out. My wife said, ‘Ed, what do you need it, it’s a headache.’ You think I want power? I don’t give a goddamn for power! You think I care about being a big shot? Some big shot. No, what I care about is the buildings and grounds. That the fountain works and the lights are lit in the halls and no one is stuck in the elevator and the crab grass should drop dead. What I care about is that there ain’t no litter and when a rose is planted a rose comes up. I’m on the janitors’ asses like a top sergeant. They hate my guts, but I get things done.”

The speech was crazily moving. Preminger felt a swell of sympathy for Mr. Eisner, for all of them, though he did not know what to make of their strange call. They spoke to him like evangelists; their eyes shone. He brought chairs from the kitchen for those who were still standing, and found himself nodding at what they said, listening as carefully as he ever had to anything in his life. One by one each had his say. Never had people spoken this way to him, so clearly seeking his approval — more, his conversion, as if without it they would not be able to go on themselves. He felt wooed, bid for at some odd auction, standing by as his value rose and rose, fetching sums undreamed of.

“I think,” a man said, “he needs a clearer picture of the overall setup.”

“This is Mr. Morris Barney,” Salmi said. “He edits the house organ, The House Organ, and writes the highly readable column ‘A Story Within a Storey.’ “

“Three buildings,” Barney said briskly, naming them on his fingers, “North, South and Center. Two of them, North and South, high-rises, sixteen stories, each accommodating one hundred twenty-eight apartments, two hundred fifty-six for the pair. Center House, though only eleven stories high, has twenty-two apartments to the floor or two hundred and forty-two in all. This gives you a total of four hundred and ninety-eight units, a figure carefully thought out by the owners—”

“We’re the owners,” a woman said.

“We’re the owners. We are the owners,” Barney told her, “but let’s not kid ourselves, this place didn’t go up by itself and it didn’t go up because of us. Harris is the brains.”

“A brilliant man,” President Salmi said.

“—carefully thought out by the owners beforehand, the total falling just two units shy of the number officially designated by the U.S. Government as a project. This eliminates a considerable amount of red tape and static from the FHA should an owner find it necessary to sell. All right, four nine eight units, three zero five of them occupied by married couples — six hundred ten marrieds. Plus a hundred eighteen solitaries — the single, widowed, widowered and divorced, a handful. In addition, seventy-three apartments owned by brothers, brothers and sisters, mother/ child or father/child relationships — two or more people living together as a family with a designation other than married. Two hundred and three of these in all. In only two apartments in Harris Towers are there married couples with children — seven people. All right, here are your figures: six hundred ten man-and-wife; one hundred eighteen solitaries”—I’m a solitary, Preminger thought—“two hundred and three in mixed families and two couples with three children. A total population of nine hundred and thirty-eight people. The median age is sixty-one.”

“Thank you,” Salmi said, “for a brilliant breakdown.” He turned to Preminger. “Almost a thousand people,” he said. “Many small towns aren’t as large. We’re practically a government,” he said breathlessly. “We’re a microcosm. If we can make it work here, why can’t they make it work on the outside? Do you follow me? The answer is simple. Where are your blacks? Where are your PR’s? The answer is simple, my dear Marshall. There aren’t any. We’re not only a community, we’re a ghetto! You know things, you’re a scholar. Athens was a ghetto. Rome was. For slaves read custodians, read carpenters, gardeners and the three lads in the underground garage. Read lifeguards and the girls in the office and the executives of the corporation and you have the new Athens on the North Side. Twenty-five people, outsiders, twenty-five on the nose to support the life of nine hundred and thirty-eight, one to thirty-seven. Not a good ratio, Preminger. Count police, fire, civil service and spoils appointments in Chicago as a whole and you have one to less than nineteen. How do we catch up? What’s the economics, Mrs. Ornfeld of Budget?”

Mrs. Ornfeld of Budget looked like all the clubwomen who had ever introduced Preminger to his audiences on the lecture circuit. When she spoke, however, she sounded tougher than any of them ever had, biting off her words like a lady Communist. “Bleak,” she said. “Four nine eight apartments. A maintenance that varies with the size and location of the unit but averages two hundred and fifty dollars a month.” (Were they dunning him, then? Was that what this was all about?) “Times four hundred ninety-eight makes a nut of one hundred and twenty-four thousand, five hundred dollars. That’s the sum we turn over to Harris each month and which he disburses as expenses and payroll. One hundred and twenty-four thousand five hundred dollars — and its peanuts.” She pronounced the word as if she were shelling them in her mouth.

“Shall we raise the maintenance?” It was President Salmi. “Shall we, Marshall? What happens when they strike? When the staff strikes? Shall we raise the maintenance? What do you say we each put in an additional fifty a month? The median age here is sixty-one, Barney tells us. We’re approaching fixed incomes. Because we’re a new Athens on the North Side will the foundations help us out, do you think? Shall we nickel-and-dime ourselves and raise the monthly maintenance gradually until the five extra dollars becomes ten and the ten fifteen and the fifteen thirty and the thirty the original fifty we were so afraid of, and the fifty some outrageous figure we can’t even conceive of now? One day it will come to that. It will. It will have to. But wait. I see an alternative. We cut down services. We drain the pool, fire a janitor or two. Run the heat and air conditioning only at peak times. Watch the flowers die. Learn skills, basic mechanics and carpentry and the electrician’s wisdom. Do for ourselves. But! But don’t ask me to be your president! I’ll not preside over such an organization!”

“Don’t ask me to oversee that sort of budget,” Mrs. Ornfeld moaned.

“I wouldn’t print such news,” Barney said.

“So you see, Marsh?” Salmi said. “Are you looking at this picture? Paradise. A paradise these houses and towers. Open not yet two years, a one hundred percent occupancy since barely March. Do you see? Are you watching? Here too is the decline of the Roman Empire, the dissolution of the city-states. How does it feel to be in history?”

Preminger nodded.

“So when I say participate, I mean participate,” Salmi said. “It ain’t all sweetness and it ain’t all light, and all worlds go broke and every hope wears a thin tread and punctures like a tire. The forecast is not terrific and the times they are a-changing. What happened to Dad, my dear young orphan, happens also on a scale so massive as to be incomprehensible to finite minds like ours. Death is built into the universe like windows in walls.”

Moved, Preminger sat silently on the rug. He was not embarrassed by the speech. None of them were; he heard them breathing, sighing, felt the calm induced by truth. No one hurried to break the silence Salmi had shaped. Here, at last, was his father’s eulogy, the shivah perfected. If he hadn’t thought they would take it as a stunt he would have crawled to the mourner’s bench and sat on it.

“But cheer up,” Salmi said quietly, “take heart, my friends. Land maybe ho, my good Marshall. If all is losing, all’s not yet lost. We’re organized. We gamble against the house — do you like the joke? — but we’re informed of the odds. Most of them”—he indicated the residents throughout the buildings—“think we’re too self-important, ‘Squeak squeak,’ they say for Mickey Mouse. ‘Neigh,’ they go for horseshit, our neighbors and neighsayers. But perhaps we haven’t explained ourselves properly. We may not have made ourselves clear.”

“Trust the people,” Mrs. Ornfeld said.

Salmi turned fiercely to Morris Barney. “You could write an editorial. I’ve told you this a hundred times. Lay it on the line, let them know. Wake them up!”

“My press is free,” Barney said.

“Yeah, yeah, sure.”

“They don’t want to read that stuff, Herb.”

Salmi turned back to Preminger. “Well, I’m an old war-horse,” he said apologetically. “I make these speeches. Look, there are committees — Entertainment, Activities, the newspaper. A few like Buildings and Grounds and Units and Budget are largely watchdog to see that the management keeps up its share of the bargain. But there are others — the Good Neighbors, Emergency, Security, Education. New Residents I foresee will soon be absorbed, since we’re one hundred percent occupied. My colleagues have mimeographed sheets which explain the function of these committees. They’ll leave them with you. You’ll look them over. Sixty-one,” he said wearily. “The median age in this room is that. It feels like ninety. Oh, boy. Oh, well. Read the stuff. Think and study. See where your talents lead you.”

“I will.”

“How old are you?”

“Thirty-seven.”

“Thirty-seven,” Salmi said. “You’re the youngest resident, you know that? Younger even than the children of the two couples whose children still live with them.”

“I am?”

“Yeah,” President Salmi said, “you’re the hope of the future, the new generation.”

“Was my father on a committee? Is that why there’s an opening?” Preminger asked. “Do you want me to carry on his work?”

“Your father was here for the ride. He rode us piggyback.”

“I’d like to do some special pleading,” Morris Barney said. “My understanding is that Marshall is studying for his doctorate. He probably has a flair for writing. I could use a guy like that on the paper.”

“Not so fast,” Mrs. Ehrlmann said, “a college man’s natural place would be on my Education committee.”

“Thirty-seven and built like a horse,” someone else said, “a shoe-in for Security.”

“I have a heart condition,” Preminger told the husky man who had spoken.

“I hoped this wouldn’t happen,” Salmi said. “Let’s not bum’s-rush this man. It’s enough right now to get a commitment of interest from him. Are you interested?”

“I am,” Preminger said earnestly. “It’s a question of where I’ll be able to do the most good.”

“Sleep on it, Marshall,” Salmi, rising, said.

“I will, but I think I can give you assurances now.” It sounded grand. Such words had never been in his mouth before. He could taste them. He could give assurances, pledges, wheeling and dealing in the stocks and bonds of the civil. He spoke from the highest plateau of the civic and formal. Men in groups, he’d noticed — till now he’d never been one — no matter their private status or lack of it, regardless of their ordinary one-on-one style, often spoke with a fluency that surfaced like submarines in the middles of seas. Where did they come from, these facts at the blunt fingertips, these figures sitting on the tongue like names and primary colors, all the law-court style like foreign language converted in dreams? Were we political then, our causes and positions mysterious and concealed and only waiting on us to be revealed at rallies and assemblies, or even in mobs? He’d thrilled to the articulate accounts of eyewitnesses breathed into microphones offered like cigarettes, to all the passionate summations of the rank and file and spiels of the momentarily possessed, fearing in their charmed patter only the failure of his own. How had he, thrity-seven, a Ph.D. candidate and heart patient — yes, you’d think that would count for something, add at least to his vocabulary of pain and fear — waiting on his next attack (and an ex-seventeen-thousand-dollar-a-year lecturer at that, though the lectures had all carefully been worked out in private and delivering them had involved no more than simply reading aloud), managed to avoid his share of public speaking? Why had there been no issues in his life? “I think I can give you assurances now,” he repeated, trying to stand. He loved whoever loved him. If there was fury in him, vengeance and retaliation like the wound springs and coils in bombs, there was also gratitude — what they offered was rebuff’s sweet opposite — and eye-for-an-eye obligation like a perfect bookkeeping. He stood before them and held his hands like pans in a scale. “It isn’t a question of sleeping on it. All that’s at issue is which committee can make the most of me, of whatever minimal talents I possess. Later this evening I intend to put through a long-distance call to a colleague in Montana. I shall ask him to forward my belongings to my Chicago address — this as an earnest of my commitment to make a life here.

“You may not, however, be aware of the exact status of my proprietorship in Harris Towers, and I feel under a certain obligation to apprise you of it. In all fairness, I am not yet technically an owner — nor shall I be until my father’s will has been probated. Shirley Fanon has apprised me, however, that my prospects are positive, and that so long as I occupy these premises and fulfill my financial obligations to the condominium, I enjoy the full rights of surrogacy.” They looked a little restless. He tried again. “Before you go,” he said, “I’d take it as a kindness if you’d let me try to thank you. You’ve shown your kindness by coming here tonight. I haven’t given you coffeecake or offered you drinks or any of the hospitality I’m certain I would have received at your hands in your homes. The cupboard is bare. Whatever I had your Emergency Fund Committee provided and it’s all gone. I plead lassitude.”

Now they seemed not only restless but uneasy. He couldn’t help himself; he couldn’t stop. “I’ve lived provisionally here,” he said. “Like someone under military government, martial law, an occupied life. This isn’t going as I meant it to. I’m a stranger — that’s something of what I’m driving at. My life is a little like being in a foreign country. There’s displaced person in me. I feel — listen — I feel…Jewish. I mean even here, among Jews, where everyone’s Jewish, I feel Jewish. Does that make sense? Something in me was left out. Damn. I mean, why is it that the only place I can think to be, to live, is here? I mean, you just told me: I’m the youngest of nine hundred thirty-eight people. It isn’t as if I earned this place the way the rest of you did. Or even had it in my mind as a goal. I saw it once with my father when it was still a hole in the ground. To tell you the truth, I didn’t trust it. I thought it was like buying property in a swamp, that my dad was being taken and the buildings would never go up. I thought it was a scheme. I didn’t like the looks of the coat of arms sewn on the salesmen’s jackets. I have no good imagination,” he said. “Nobody cheats me, but I feel it coming. But what Dr. Salmi said about the possibilities here, that was very meaningful to me. I want to do my share. I will do my share.” He looked around to see if they had understood him. No one seemed to know what to say.

Dr. Salmi did. “It ain’t the All-Star Game,” he said. “It ain’t church. We see to it there are no fire hazards, that people, they throw a party in the party room, are responsible for cleaning the place up afterwards.”

“Yes,” Preminger said, “that’s what I want.”

“That the grandkids come for a visit they don’t scream in the halls and run the elevator all day up and down so you can’t get it when you need it.”

“Of course.”

“That the bricks don’t come down on our heads when we walk by outside.”

“Yes.”

“That people park only in the space assigned them and the guy who plays accordion for our dances takes a ten-minute break, ten minutes, no more, every hour on the hour. That the newsprint for the paper comes wholesale from a friend’s cousin and a good chlorine level is maintained in the pool at all times.”

“Sure,” Preminger said.

“That we got a community here and an investment to protect,” President Salmi said, his eyes fixed narrowly on Preminger, “and that when someone sells he sells to the right sort — no Chinks, no PR’s, no spades.”

When they left he put their mimeographed sheets aside, wanting neither to throw them away nor to find a place for them — like his father’s, the dead man’s mail, which continued to come.

For a week or more he gave himself over to the chores involved in setting up a household. He wrote letters to his bank in Montana and closed down his account, arranging for a cashier’s check to be sent him. He consulted with Shirley Fanon about the steps he’d initiated to probate his father’s will. He called the phone and electric companies and had everything put in his name. He stocked up at the supermarket and bought some clothes. He packed his father’s things away and put up a notice on the bulletin board in the game room saying that whoever wanted anything of his father’s could come up, look through the stuff and take away what he needed. (First he’d checked with Fanon to see if it was legal. “Sure,” the lawyer told him, “none of that’s in the inventory. Give it all away if you want.”) No one came for three days. Then an old man showed up who did not even live in the building. He had ridden buses, he said — an hour and a half from the Southwest Side. How had the notice come to his attention? Preminger never understood. He had brought shopping bags, and Preminger helped him to fold his father’s expensive clothing, the nifty bellbottoms and wallpaper prints, the psychedelic ties and turtlenecks and wide belts and leather vests, into them. He had to give the old man carfare to go home.

He rode buses himself, down to the near North Side or out to Lake Shore Drive or up to Evanston, occasionally drifting even further, to Chicago’s gilt-edged northern suburbs, Winnetka and Wilmette and Kenilworth, all those expensive citadels which simply to see triggered wonder at the immense wealth in America, at the vast depth on its bench. Who were these people? How could they have gotten so much money? How could there be so many of them? Their homes made his mouth water. They looked like fraternity houses, country clubs, embassies. Tudorial, stately, with high green hedges and curving driveways like painterly exercises in perspective. Blue Lake Michigan sucking up to their backyards. Attached to their carriage houses and wide garages were basketball hoops, gleaming cat’s cradles of white net, taut and tapered as hourglasses. He imagined lean, expert girls in blue jeans, home from Radcliffe, Holyoke, Smith, setting them up, pushing them in, playing Horse and 21, with their tan, continent boyfriends who had once been pages in the Senate. The cropped lawns, green as felt on gaming tables, made him gulp, and an occasional sound from the swimming pool of splashing water like polite applause made his heart turn over. Lake Michigan and a pool. Twice, when he saw strings of Chinese lanterns set out for parties, he had to shut his eyes.

He came to shop, it being simply good sense, he told himself, as immutable as that rule of the highway that one eats where the trucks are standing, that one should buy where the rich do, go to their bakers and butchers, find out how they come by their vegetables and which fruits they are eating. (And it could be justified economically. Weren’t things more expensive in the slums? Wouldn’t a single Rolls-Royce, properly cared for, last all one’s life, mellowing, blooming with use, ever perfecting itself, cheaper in the long run than the three Fords, two Chevies, pair of Dodges, one Pontiac, two Buicks and trio of Oldsmobiles that was the average man’s portion?) But the fiction that he had come merely to shop wore thin, though to preserve it he always brought something back with him — a Black Forest chocolate cake, a Spanish melon, tins of Dutch herring, Russian caviar, pickled rinds. Now, when he went on these excursions, he went obsessively, growing angry and genuinely dangerous.

He had been safer in Missoula. Even if it had its better neighborhoods and occasional mansion, Missoula was still the West, where wealth was expressed in land no man could walk in a day, and which, for all its vastness, looked no different square yard for square yard — perhaps poorer, actually — than the place where one lay down one’s picnic, and where the stores were franchises one had grown up with: Penney’s, Woolworth’s, Rexall’s and Howard Johnson’s, a two-bit Hanseatic democracy of the ordinary. Chicago was different in kind. In the neighborhoods filled with their Village and Paoli and Chelsea chic that he tramped through, Chicago grieved him, tore at his spirit and opened old wounds he was helpless to stanch. He roamed Rush Street, Old Town, Lake Shore Drive and Michigan Avenue like someone seeking pornography, desire and need clobbering his spirit, drooling before the lush goods in the shop windows, eyeing the young housewives and fashionable women like a soiled madman. He was jealous of the well-dressed children, envying them their door-manned prerogatives and elevator buildings and begrudging them what he imagined would be their French and their quick minds, their nannies and good manners. A sycophant, whenever one bumped into him he apologized, diseased at the figure he cut in front of them. He walked lasciviously past brownstones, studio apartments, tall high-rises beehived with bachelor pads, the shared flats of stewardesses, young lawyers, radio announcers, journalists and photographers, sketching in their perfect taste and lovely freedom, their ease as they idly drummed a steering wheel, double-parked in small, open convertibles, persuaded of their ability with wine, their stereophonics and terrific records. (Tapes; they would be tapes now.) In a leathercraft shop he was annoyed with himself because, unlike the slim owner in the jeans and turtleneck, he was not a homosexual. He watched the young man greet a woman just returned from Europe, looked on as, laughing and talking, the faggot embraced her. Why, he likes her, he thought, he really likes her. Yet she doesn’t mean a thing to him. See how his eyes were open when he kissed her. Mine would have been shut tight and my cock would have been out to here. He hated himself because he was not artistic, light, healthy, easy. If such a girl kissed me I would ask her to marry me.

For more than a week he went to such sections of the city, hunting them like a ghost, restless, yet coveting tweed rather than flesh, wools and leathers more than body and form. Perhaps he yearned for an encounter, but in their bars and cocktail lounges he was silent. Nothing happened, he had no adventure, and after the first strong flush of sexuality he was as before — as he had been all his life — calmly admiring, sedately appreciative, his very hopelessness satisfying his lust by quenching it, by stripping him of illusions and granting him a sort of amnesty. All his life he had disposed of his sexuality this way. His tastes and greeds kept him single, fashion’s narrow bigot.

In despair he turned back to the condominium, hopeful of a ride with Mrs. Riker to the High-Low, the Stop-’n-Shop, the I.G.A., washed up on the condominium as on some shabby strand of the average. Never letting on and nursing his grudge like a gent, but for all that some wild and even noble revolutionary instinct smoldering in him. It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t right. Why couldn’t he have the things he wanted to have instead of the things — and those in probate — he had? Secretly he was niggered, chinkified, PR’d. If President Salmi knew his thoughts he’d find a way to break the will.

While the cupboard filled and he waited for his possessions from Missoula, he occupied his time by examining libraries — Northwestern’s was not far — purchasing stocks of paper, ballpoint pens, pencils, a new dictionary, a thesaurus. He priced electric typewriters. He even began to work up some ideas for a new lecture — on condominiums — and though he actually wrote about a dozen pages (perhaps twenty or so minutes of platform time), he worked desultorily and with no conviction that he would ever finish it. Indeed, he was more conscious of himself than ever. He knew he was lonely and began to miss his father, fantasizing a dignified life for the two of them in the apartment together. Actually he knew more people here than in Missoula. What had his life been like there? The same, he decided, certainly the same, yet somehow he hadn’t noticed. Maybe this was a good sign. Perhaps unhappiness wakes you up, a signal to the spirit like a chronic cough. All right, he was up.

He wondered how he’d managed to pass time since his heart attack. If he really was awake at last, then didn’t that make him a sort of Rip Van Winkle? Had he slept twenty years? Who’d robbed him in the night, then, of the beard he’d earned in his long sleep? How did he recognize the cars? Why was he not astonished by the jets circling his head in their holding patterns above O’Hare? Why weren’t the styles strange to him, the length of women’s skirts and the cut of men’s pants? How did he know the name of the President, and why didn’t television frighten him? In aspects other than the impersonal he was a true amnesiac, the public life realer to him than his own. Here he was, a thirty-seven-year-old graduate student — how did he know his age? who’d been keeping track of it for him? — lacking only his thesis for his Ph.D. in…what? (He knew, but could not remember why he’d gone into the field. He had no interest in it. He was no scholar. The collapse of the job market had been the one fortunate aspect of his academic career. Why impose him as a teacher on students who probably had more interest in his subject than he had?) He was certain only that he had been no better off in Missoula than he was in Chicago. It was solely this which kept him from returning there at once.

Concomitantly he understood something which could yet prove to be valuable. He understood how unhappy he was — understood, that is, that it was no mood. He did not discount other people’s unhappiness. There were those who lost limbs, whose health failed, who couldn’t make it at today’s prices, those whose loved ones died, who would never get what they wanted and who wanted it more for exactly that reason, those whose reputations were stripped away, those who had done great crimes and knew they’d slipped up, that even now the net was tightening. There were those whose expectations, so nearly realized, were disappointed by technicalities, those who were habituated to subtle poisons, those who were condemned. Even now, he supposed, there were children lost in the forest, and there were those whose plane was going down in the mountains and those whose bodies were being humiliated by sadists. People were drowning who had simply meant to go for a sail in the lake. There were cars overturning, burning, their drivers still alive but trapped by steering wheels and stove-in doors. He didn’t discount other people’s unhappiness. More power to them. All he knew was that he was as unhappy as any of them, as unhappy as anyone who had ever lived in the world. And this was a fact, as true of himself as his right-handedness.

Something else was true. For the first time in his life this man, this in-his-best-moments hypochondriac who feared illness and saw mortality in the headache and the common cold, who prized experience and blessed whatever of geography he had seen for its mystery and disparateness, who honored the accomplishments of others and waited in suspense for their new inventions and next books, who melted at all kindnesses to himself as involuntarily as he grew stiff-necked at slurs — this same fellow sat on his mourner’s bench (even now taking a certain — yes — pleasure at the juxtaposition) and quite seriously, and for the first time in his life, considered suicide. At last a quick and even violent death was preferable to what he now understood he had always, if often unwittingly, endured. He had been left out. Jesus, it was the complaint of a kid in a schoolyard, a thing fat boys confessed to their pillows. Only that. Wallflowered by life. Left out. Not through conspiracy, as little through fault, luck of the draw in an unlucky world. Left out. Many are called but few are chosen. And some, like himself, weren’t even called. Left out. How do you goddamnit like that?

In the books he’d read and films he’d seen the characters found a parade and joined it. They bought loud clothes and a bunch of balloons. And the triumph of pure trying was satisfying, even thrilling, as all existential assertions are thrilling, as all little motions are — the cripple’s faltering step and the mute’s first word, garbled, ripped from a torn cone of throat and lovelier than an aria. Energy admirable at long range, other people’s wills and small defiances a beautiful metaphor. How he’d wept when men climbed the moon, the more impressive for its pointlessness. How impressed he’d been at apothecary measures of all strangers’ bravery, little guys’ puny resistances, Denmark’s treatment of its Jews, his father’s sideburns — all that judo of the spirit. But what did any of that come to? A life of stumble, of maimed conversation, effort a lousy substitute for results — and in the end just another compromise. Why should he settle; why should he make deals with his needs? Why should certain men live? There was nothing for it but to cut throats and slice wrists. To be or not to be, you schmuck. Why couldn’t he do it, then? Fear? A little, but nah. Scruples? The notion that as a suicide he would end up with even less than all those compromised cripples and mitigated heroes with their qualified lives? No, no. Why then? Because by now he had lived too long with a sense of justice, with the conviction that if you pay and pay eventually they must give you something for your money, that otherwise they would be shut down. Christ, he thought, his blood still in his veins, his brains and liver and other organs where they were supposed to be, his internals stashed away in the drawers and cupboards of his belly like things in a well-ordered household, I am religious, I am a religious man. I believe in God.

About a month after coming to Chicago he received the shipment from Missoula. When the Railway Express man came to his door, Preminger, forgetting it was he who was responsible, was very excited. Packages, boxes and cartons addressed in an unfamiliar hand still had the power to give him hope. When he saw that they contained only his own things — his books and typewriter, his small, cheap assortment of dishes, cutlery and glasses, his everyday clothes (he’d brought with him all his grand stuff, dressing for his father’s death as for a cruise) — he was disappointed and didn’t even bother to unpack it all. What had he expected? Toys? Rich gifts from mysterious admirers? There wasn’t even a letter to give him the gossip about the few people he knew in Montana, and he guessed that the sender, a graduate student who lived in the same rooming house and with whom he’d gotten drunk once or twice and gone to a few movies, must have been pretty pissed off for all the trouble he’d caused him. He had known it was an imposition and had made his request with a greater urgency than he’d felt, pleading his altered life, hinting that windfall kept him in Chicago, not so much to boast as to get his acquaintance off the dime. “Oh, and listen,” he’d said on the telephone, “don’t bother about the liquor.” (A half-bottle of Scotch, a fifth of Beefeaters still in its cellophane truss.) And told the student to keep his Activities book. (A not inconsiderable gift — about a hundred dollars’ worth of tickets for plays, concerts and football games.) But the booze and tickets had been sent as well, a sign from the West — that new life or no, he was a pain in the ass. He moved the stuff onto the bed in the second bedroom where, along with the deflated basketball and the odd game or photograph that had survived his father’s compulsive redecorating, they already seemed further vestigial artifacts of a prior life.

It was a year that the summer had its teeth in the city, the weather like a tricky currency. One watched it like the stock market. Highs in the hundreds were not uncommon. The sky was white and cloudless. There was a drought. The leaves on the trees were a golden green and rattled like gourds in the softest wind. Preminger, who’d lived in the West, sometimes looked alertly behind him when he heard this sound in the street, as if expecting snakes in the trees. People moved outside on their balconies, not because it was cooler there but to be closer to the phenomenon. It was odd to see them suspended there, on the sides of the buildings, like balloonists in baskets or a hundred teams of window washers.

One day, the first since the occasion of his public drowning, when people were sunning themselves in the chaise longues and deck chairs, Preminger went down to the pool and discovered that it was being drained. The lifeguard explained that it was always closed after Labor Day. As he stood there, the phone rang; the lifeguard excused himself, listened for a few moments and nodded. When he hung up he clapped his hands for their attention.

“That was the office,” he told them. “It seems that because of the heat a lot of the residents have been complaining about shutting down the pool. I’ve been instructed to fill her up again. They’re going to close down the other two but will keep this one open until the weather breaks.” Several people applauded. The lifeguard gestured that he had more to tell them. “Only,” he said over their enthusiasm, “only there won’t be an official Red Cross lifeguard after today, and the management says that, like always, swimming will be at your own risk, only more so. I’m supposed to fill the pool and turn my chemicals over to the Activities Committee who’ll police the pool and provide its own lifeguards.” A cheer went up, and Preminger, who’d never before been in on an eleventh-hour stay of execution, joined in.

A woman raised her hand.

“Yes, Mrs. Krozer?” the lifeguard said.

“This is the only pool that will be open?”

“That’s right. This one will service all three buildings.”

“Won’t that make it awfully crowded? What about guests?”

“Sunday rules.” On Sunday the pool was closed to guests.

Preminger raised his hand. Would they be able to swim that afternoon?

“It’s going to take a few hours to fill it up,” the lifeguard said. “Anyway, I think they mean for the committee to get squared away first. They said there’s a special session of Activities going on right now.”

When Preminger left his deck chair a couple of hours later he saw that a stack of a special mimeographed edition of The House Organ had been placed on one of the marble tables in the lobby. Taking one from the pile, he looked it over as he rode up in the elevator and saw that his name had been put down as one of the volunteer lifeguards.

His phone was ringing when he opened the door to his apartment.

“Hey, Montana, hot enough for you?”

“Who is this?”

“Wa’al, pardner, some folks roun’ these parts call me Harris. It’s the management his own self, stranger.”

“I was going to call you.”

“Ain’t that sumfin? Ain’t that a how-de-do?”

“I’m listed in the paper as a volunteer lifeguard.”

“Thass right, deppity.”

“Nobody asked me anything about it.”

“Mister, this yere condominium needs a lifeguard.”

“It’ll have to get someone else.”

“Rein up a sec, son. If you read that notice proper, you’d a seed that your name’s only been put in nomination. You ain’t been elected yet.”

“Elected? You elect the lifeguards?”

“Shoot, boy, it’s a democracy, ain’t it? Ain’t President Salmi told you?”

“This is ridiculous. No one had the right to nominate me.”

“Looks to me like a clear draft choice. Will of the pee-pul.”

“Will of the people.”

“Well, not all the pee-pul. Salmi dragged his feet some when he saw your name on the list Activities come up with. He’s still a mite uneasy about you since you made that speech to the Committee of Committees assembled.”

Preminger recalled his queer emotion that evening and winced. “I was very vulnerable,” he said. Then, “How did you know about that?”

“I read the minutes.”

“The minutes? There were minutes?”

“It was a duly constituted meeting. Sure there were minutes, of course there were minutes. I take an interest. I always read them. I swan, it purely tickles me what these folks are capable of.” Harris chuckled. “That last is off the record, friend.”

“Sure.”

“What’s that you say? Cain’t rightly hear you.”

“It’s off the record. I swan.”

“Much obleeged.”

“Why’d you call me?” Preminger asked.

“I told you. I take an interest.”

“I purely tickle you, too.”

“As the driven snow, buddy,” Harris said.

Preminger got the name of the Activities chairman from the lists they had left with him and dialed the number. “Dr. Luskin?”

“The dentist is with a patient. This is Dr. Luskin’s nurse, Judy. Did you want an appointment.”

“No. This is Marshall Preminger.”

“Marshall, how are you? It’s Judy Luskin. Congratulations.”

“What for?”

“I heard about your nomination for lifeguard. My sincere good wishes to you.”

“Have we met?”

“Formally not, as it turns out. But I saw you at the pool. I knew you wasn’t drownding.” The fatso. “As a matter of fact it was me who told Howard what a good swimmer you are.”

“Would you give Dr. Luskin a message for me? Would you please tell him that I don’t want the nomination and that my name should be taken off the list?”

“Have you found a job, Marshall?”

“Just tell your husband, will you please, Nurse?”

Within the hour there was another call. It was Salmi and he was very angry. “You said, ‘All that’s at issue is which committee can make the most of me.’ ‘I want to do my share,’ you said. It’s in the minutes. Well, now we know which committee can make the most of you. Activities. And you balk. Is that how you do your share?”

“I wasn’t even asked.”

“You weren’t even asked. Did you ever? He’s standing on ceremonies, a born lifeguard and he stands on ceremonies. If you saw someone drowning would you wait to be asked before you jumped in?”

“That’s not the point.”

“Would you?”

“Of course not, but—”

“I told you. A born lifeguard. The instincts of a natural life-saver.”

“You’re crazy,” Preminger said. He was unable to restrain himself. “Do you know my condition? Do you know that I’ve been contemplating suicide? That I ride buses to strange neighborhoods and eat my heart out when I see the way other people live? How do you expect me to—?”

“The buses stopped.”

“What?”

“The buses stopped. Almost two weeks now and you ain’t been on a bus. You get what you need in this neighborhood and you come home.”

“Is that in the minutes?”

“It’s a community, Preminger, we told you that. It made your eyes water when I described it. You had a hard-on from it. What do you think, in a community you’re invisible?”

“Listen, I don’t—”

“Preminger, I ain’t got time for all this. It’s a heat wave, a record-buster. Scorchers and corkers. Every day an old record falls and a new one is made. Air conditioning ain’t to be trusted. There’s a drain on the power. Brown-outs are coming. The weather people have seen nothing like it in their experience. My people need that swimming pool. They’re getting up there. Swimming’s their exercise. Dr. Paul Dudley White wants old people to go swimming, the Surgeon General does. But there’s danger. It needs supervision. The regular lifeguards go back to college. They got to come out of the pool, their lips are blue. This is a job for a young man. You’re thirty-seven. Who else is thirty-seven here? Most of us won’t see fifty-seven again. ‘All that’s at issue is which committee can make the most of me,’ you said. You thanked us. You wanted to put cheesecake in our mouths for coming to you. We left you our literature.

“Listen,” Salmi went on softly, “you think this can last forever? It’s a natural phenomenon. Such heat is an act of God. God gave us jungles for the heat that lasts forever, He gave us deserts for it. He didn’t put it in Chicago. It’ll break — it has to. I give it three weeks, four at the outside.” He was speaking very softly now, almost conspiratorially. “On Halloween it’ll be so cold you won’t even be able to remember it, and you can go back to your — back to your thoughts. What you were talking about. But I’ll tell you something. You won’t. You’ll have different thoughts. Better thoughts.”

“Forget that stuff about my thoughts,” Preminger said. “Sure it’s hot and we need the pool, but you don’t understand something. I’m working on my thesis.”

“You passed your prelims?”

“Yes, I—”

“Your orals? You’ve taken your orals?”

“Yes.”

“Your thesis proposal has been approved and you’ve got someone to work with?”

“That’s right.”

“Are you writing? Have you done all your reading yet?”

“Most of it.”

“Have you blocked out your first chapter?”

It was astonishing to him how well they knew the jargon. He would have thought they would have no notion of all the stages involved in earning a doctorate, but almost every one of them had a precise understanding of his graduate status. Their children had familiarized them with it, their married sons and daughters off in universities. Learning was old hat to them, the crises and obstacles as familiar as a fever chart. They’d broken the code. “Yes,” he said wearily, “my first two chapters are written. I’m on my third.”

“Then you’re sitting pretty,” Salmi said, “it sounds to me like you can work at home. You can do your footnotes later at a library. You can work up your bibliography afterwards.”

“That’s right.”

“You’ve got to get out of that apartment. It was better when you rode the buses. As it is, you’re around more than the vegetables. Get a clipboard and write at the pool. You got a clipboard?”

“No.”

“We’ll get you one. We’ll get you a pith helmet and suntan lotion.”

“I haven’t been elected yet.”

“A formality. Tomorrow morning you’ll be up on the high chair with a whistle on your neck.”

He agreed to stand for lifeguard.

One thing puzzled him: Harris had said Salmi was reluctant to have him. That afternoon when he went down to the office to sign some papers Fanon had left for him he ran into Harris and mentioned what was on his mind.

“Salmi,” Harris said lightly, “Salmi’s a figurehead. It’s a puppet regime.”

In fact he was elected, but not before the threat of a runoff between himself and Skippy Fisher, an old vaudevillian who was very popular with the residents. In the twenties Skippy had been a feature performer in The Ziegfeld Follies. It was said that he’d introduced “Melancholy Baby.” When Preminger heard about the tie he refused to run against the old-timer and withdrew his candidacy. There wasn’t anything Salmi could say to get him to change his mind. But Preminger reluctantly agreed when the President asked for a few hours to try to work out a deal.

Two hours later Salmi appeared, smiling. “Congratulations,” he said, “all the precincts have been heard from. It’s you.”

“What about Skippy Fisher?”

“Skippy’s pulled out. He’s withdrawn his name from nomination.”

“Why?”

“He pulled out. He sees it isn’t for him.”

“What happened? What did you do?”

Salmi smiled. “I said there’d be a whispering campaign. I told him I’d tell people that what he really introduced was ‘She’s Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage’—real golden oldies. I said I’d let everyone know he’s incontinent, that he makes weewee in the swimming pool. That even if he managed to save you he’d pee all over you.”

“Jesus,” said Preminger. “The Making of the Lifeguard, 1971.”

“Don’t worry about it. They didn’t really want him. He was the sentimental favorite. When you get to be our age, sonny, you can’t always bring yourself to violate your feelings.”

So Preminger, newly orphaned Montana scholar, the faint smell of smoke from the back room still lingering in his nostrils, through bald power plays released a college boy to return to active duty and at thirty-seven years of age and for the duration of a capricious heat spell, became the duly elected lifeguard pro tem of the Harris Towers Condominium on the North Side of Chicago. It was the first elected position he had ever held, his single incumbency and, he had to admit, his best prospect, the only game in town.

What was astonishing to him was how quickly and completely he assumed the badges of his office, how comfortable they made him feel and how powerful. He’d had hints of something like it before: several summers back, on his one trip to Europe, he’d left his hotel and been wandering the streets of Rome when, turning a corner, he’d come suddenly upon the Colosseum. He’d seen pictures of it, but always before he’d merely glossed its reality, the Colosseum as a possibility not actually registering; yet there it really was in the street, as anything might have been in the street; it wasn’t — this struck him as odd — even guarded; he might have pulled off a piece of one of its shaggy stones and slipped it in his pocket and gone off with it, a piece of the actual, honest-to-God Colosseum in his pocket. Important things actually existed and they had the effect on you they were supposed to have, a Lourdes efficacy in nature and history that was astonishing; yet one rarely took the fabulous enough for granted. He discovered afresh how vulnerable, like all men, he was to play, to signs and the simple power of images, what tremendous realities adumbrated in a toy. Strap a holster about your waist and the body automatically adjusts, the center of gravity shifts, the pelvis boasts and you sway, lope, bowleggedness in the centers of the brain. Sing sea chanteys in a canoe and feel love’s moods in parks.

There really was a whistle. There really was a high wooden platform chair with a beach umbrella blooming from it. There were sun lotions and mysterious silver pastes for the cheekbone beneath each eye, like the warpaint of Indians. There were quires of Turkish towels, neatly folded and giving off from their stacks a sort of glowing energy like that which came from place settings in restaurants before anyone has eaten. There were sunglasses for the King of the State Troopers. There was a first-aid kit. In it were bandages, adhesive, Atabrine tablets, salt tablets, smelling salts, Mercurochrome, iodine, salves seasoned with antibiotics. There was a syringe and, God help him, a hypodermic already fitted with a single ampoule of morphine. There was digitalis.

He sat on his high platform and surveyed the pool, his eyes sharp, his concentration immense. He might have been riding shotgun in a helicopter over the Pacific hunting astronauts, or in a small plane above the Alaskan tundra looking for survivors. Or he strode along the pool’s concrete apron — his feet wet, slapping down smart footprints as he went along — or occasionally stooped, hunkered down, lowering his hand into the seemingly blue water to palm a handful and draw it toward his mouth, licking his tongue into it like a dog to taste the chlorine level. (Though they had an agreement. A janitor saw to the actual maintenance of the pool, while Preminger reserved the right to spray down its concrete deck with the hose.) His great pleasure made him guarded, suspicious of himself, wary lest he abuse the authority to which he had so quickly and luxuriously adapted. Not only religious, he thought, not only God-fearing, but at rock bottom an incipient Fascist as well! What a rogue! I must vow to use my power for good.

And he actually made some such vow, determining to play ball with the residents, to look the other way when they brought drinking glasses down to the pool, things to nosh — strictly forbidden — or when they went in without first using the footbath. On his own initiative he even suspended Sunday rules from time to time and told oldsters whose grandchildren had come to visit them that he would admit them to the pool. He was a stickler for water safety only — something which, with these old-timers, was not a problem anyway. Bridge and kalooky players, mahjongg enthusiasts (there was something curiously Oriental in the way they silently passed the tiles back and forth to each other, studiously picking over the ivory like children examining pieces of Lego) did not chase each other around the outside of the pool or push one another into the water. They did not leap two and three and four from the diving board or play Cannonball, jumping up and clasping their knees to their stomachs to pounce upon the heads of the other swimmers. In fact, they did not even go into the water much — once in the morning, perhaps, to wade in the shallow end and maybe again in the afternoon to tread water for a while and get their suits wet. A few of the more ambitious women and some of the men would occasionally dog-paddle or sidestroke a length or two of the pool, but except for these times when Preminger was all business it was pretty much a sinecure. With their cooperation, born of age and of that in them which was inflexibly sedentary, he managed to run a pretty tight swimming pool.

Only the grandchildren, infrequent visitors now that school had begun, gave him any trouble, and on these he unleashed all the authority he could muster, in fact all that with their grandparents he had kept stifled out of a deference not so much to their age as to his own character. With these children, however, awed as he was by his responsibility for their safety, he was ruthless, discovering in his shouted instructions and commands, and in the pitch of the whistle he blew at them, a barely controlled hysteria. “Out of the pool. Sit in that lounge chair for ten minutes!” “No running, no running. I’ve already warned you.” “Shallow end, shallow end!” The mothers and grandparents beamed at the disciplinary figure he projected, a manifestation at last of something they had threatened the children with for years, the man who would do things to them if they did not behave in restaurants or went too close to the cages in zoos. Yet when he saw what the score was, how he was being used as a bogyman, he rebelled by determining to settle an old score: the ancient saw about how long one must wait before going into the water after eating. His mother’s generation held that at least an hour had to pass before one could safely swim without cramping. Nothing had changed. Forgetting that it was they who had installed him in the first place and that his expertise, like his helmet and lotions, came from the office itself, they turned to him as their lifeguard, to arbitrate when the children’s nagging became too much for them. The boldest thing he did during his tenure was to assert, once and for all, ex cathedra, that there was nothing in it, that the incidence of cramp during digestion was no greater than afterwards, that time wasn’t in it at all, that being wet wasn’t. To his astonishment they abandoned at once a position they had held all their lives.

But at last even the presence of the children grew familiar, and he became indifferent to all but the most flagrant violations of safety, indifferent to everything save his own still surviving image of himself as their lifeguard. Though it was just here that he hedged. Harris had had Fanon draw up a disclaimer of responsibility for the safety of the residents during this special session of the pool. This each resident had been made to read and sign before being permitted to enter the pool area. Seeing in the document a loophole which might have left him holding the bag should anything happen, as if responsibility traveled a circuit and had if it were not at one point along the line to be at another, Preminger wrote in above Harris’s a disclaimer of his own: “And while Marshall Preminger, acting lifeguard, will do everything in his power to maintain order in the pool and save the life of anyone who through carelessness or accident finds him- or herself in difficulty, it is nevertheless understood that the said Marshall Preminger is not legally responsible for the safety of the swimmers.” (And did they see, he wondered, what a guy he was, how his lifeguard’s italics saved him, how while exempting himself from legal responsibility — just good common sense, just good business practice, just wise stewardship — he did nothing to repudiate the more important guilts?)

But no one drowned. It never came up. Only once did he find it necessary to leave his platform to help someone. Lena Jacobson, standing in perhaps four feet of water, had suddenly begun to dance and moan. “I’m cramping,” she cried. “I’m cramping.” She looked toward the platform.

“Are you in trouble?” Preminger called.

“It’s nothing to write home about,” she said, “but I’ve got this terrific cramp in my right leg. It pinches. If you’d be so kind?”

“Hold on,” Preminger said, “I’ll get you.” He climbed down from the platform and entered the pool at the shallow end, wading heavily toward the center rope near which Mrs. Jacobson stood. “Take the rope,” he said. “Hold on to that.”

“You know I didn’t even see it,” she said, “in the excitement I didn’t even see it.”

Meanwhile he continued to wade toward her, the resistance of the water forcing him into a sort of odd swagger.

“Just in time,” she said when he had come up to her. “That was a narrow squeak.” He took her arm and they strolled toward the steps. It was exactly as if he were taking her in to dinner. Meanwhile she chatted amiably to him. “I’ve been walking in swimming pools all my life and nothing like this ever happened before. I can’t get over it. One minute I’m having a good time and the next I’m not. It’s just like, you know, life.”

“I’m glad you didn’t panic.”

“No. I kept my head. I got a cool head on my shoulders.”

“How’s the cramp now?” He helped her up the steps.

“I can’t even feel it. It’s like it fell out of my foot. There’s just a little tingle like pins and needles.”

“That can be worked out with massage,” Preminger said.

“Would you do that?” she asked. “If you don’t want to touch my varicose veins I could put on my slacks.”

“Don’t be silly.” Preminger moved her to a chaise longue where he had her stretch out her legs. He pulled a chair up beside her and began to knead the right calf. Two or three people had gathered to watch. “Step back, please,” Preminger said, “give this woman some air, will you? Show’s over, folks.” They didn’t budge, and he returned to Mrs. Jacobson’s right leg, extemporizing massaging leverages as he went along. First he pulled two fingers down the back of her calf, then pinched in a lateral line, then jabbed in a vertical. He plucked at her varicose veins.

“If it hadn’t been for this one here,” Mrs. Jacobson told the bystanders, “I might not be alive to tell the tale. It was like crabs got me. It was terrible. All I wanted was to sit down in the water. I tell you, my entire life passed before my eyes. Oh yeah. There. That got it good. That’s right. I saw my childhood home in Poland. I relived my courtship and how we came to America and the place where we lived in Philadelphia. I saw the look on the mover’s face who broke my mama’s furniture when we came to Chicago, he should be moved himself in a truck a thousand miles. I saw our wedding.”

“You married the mover, Lena?” a woman asked.

“I married Jack. I saw our wedding.”

“Hey, Lena,” a man said, “did you see your wedding night?”

“Shh. He’s only a boy,” she said, indicating Preminger, bent over her right leg. She laughed and touched Preminger’s shoulder. “He wants to know did I see my wedding night.”

“What else did you see?”

“I saw my mother’s recipe for lokshin kugel. I saw the good times and I saw the bad.”

“It’s better than a picture book.”

She maneuvered her left leg into Preminger’s hands. “She says it’s better than a picture book. I saw all the good kalooky hands I ever got and Paulie grow up and move to California.” She swung her legs over the side of the chaise longue and sat up. “Listen, this is some lifeguard we elected. Darling — I can call you that because I’m an old woman and you’re a young pipsqueak — I’m telephoning Jack what you did, and if he don’t say whenever you’re downtown you can park for free in the garage I don’t know my old man.”

“Lena, you tell Jack what he did, he may come and do the boy an injury.”

“You hush. She says Jack will do you an injury.”

In fact he was invited to dinner. What he found surprising was how much he looked forward to it, and how disappointed he was when it was postponed. Jack Jacobson called him from the office. “Listen,” he said, “we talked it over. We invited you to come over for supper. What does it mean for a snappy young man to eat supper with a couple of old fogies? You’d be bored stiff. Give us a few more days on this. We’ll get some people together. My daughter Sylvia flies back from Cincinnati the middle of the week. She should be there. Let’s make it Friday night. That way no one has to go in on Saturday. You got something planned Friday night?”

“No,” Preminger said, “not Friday.”

“Then we’re in like Flynn. Friday it is. I called you first because it’s in your honor,” Jacobson said. “Leave everything to me. I got some people I especially want you to meet.”

Friday he closed the pool early and went upstairs to prepare for the dinner party. He showered carefully. Two weeks in the outdoors had given him an excellent tan. The swimming had done him good. A lot of his pot had disappeared and he could see his major ribs. Dressing scrupulously in a blue summer suit he’d had cleaned for the occasion, he carefully removed the lollipop headed pins from a crisp new shirt and placed them in a glass ashtray. He was amused by the cunning ways new shirts were folded, he was very cheerful.

But the party was a letdown. Sylvia, a pretty woman about his own age whom Preminger assumed to be divorced, had a date that evening and had to be downtown by eight-thirty. Preminger resented that no one had thought to fix him up. He’d assumed that people like these, family people, were always on the lookout for eligibility like his own. Yet no one had approached him with the names of likely girls or pressed for his attendance at their tables. Willing to serve as the bait in their legendary machinations, this was the first time he had been to any of their homes. The other guests were all from the condominium, and he couldn’t imagine who it was Jacobson had wanted him to meet.

“How about you, Preminger?” Jacobson asked, “you good for another bourbon and ginger ale?”

“Is there club soda?”

“Club soda. Ho ho. We got a real shikker in this one. He drinks like a goy. Lena, we got any seltzer for Buster Crabbe?” Buster Crabbe was only one of the names of swimmers he was to go by that evening. Johnny Weissmuller was another. And once Esther Williams.

“Ask him if he’ll take Seven-Up.”

“Water, I think.”

“Water he thinks,” Jacobson said.

“A busman’s holiday,” Lena said.

Jacobson brought his drink. “Want a piece of candy? Make it less sour?”

The decor in the Jacobson’s apartment was nothing like that in his father’s. They had moved from a large apartment on the South Side and brought all their things with them. Seven rooms of furniture crammed into five. Preminger was certain the heavy pieces were absorbing all the air conditioning in the hot apartment. In a while Jacobson, sweating, told Lena to open a window.

“Won’t that work against the air conditioning?”

“It ain’t on,” Lena said. “Air conditioning gives Jack a cold.”

Preminger hated people who got colds from air conditioning.

“Only place I don’t catch cold from air conditioning is in Chinese restaurants in California,” Jacobson said.

“I see.”

“Don’t ask me why.”

The conversation was pretty much what he heard at the pool, from the women names he was not familiar with, and from the men dark, illiberal talk of stores broken into and advancing hordes of blacks. He was astonished to learn that many of the men carried guns. Jacobson showed him one he wore inside his jacket. Someone else moved his hair with his fingers and showed him a scar. He kept silent, but even without his saying anything they seemed to know his position and sought constantly to provoke him.

“You’re a college man,” one said. “I suppose the talk up in the ivory tower is that the shvartzers are abused, that we been robbing them blind for years, that we’re slumlords and get them to sign paper they don’t understand. Am I right?”

“They try to see both sides,” Preminger said mildly.

“Both sides. Hah. You hear that? Both sides. I work with these people. I worked with them all my life. Yeah, yeah, and in the old days I lived next-door to them. They’re shiftless. On one side they’re shiftless and on the other side they’re worthless. There’s your both sides.”

“What’s the matter,” someone else said angrily, “the Jews weren’t oppressed for years? They were oppressed plenty, believe me. But they didn’t go crying to the NAACP.”

“They went crying to the B’nai B’rith,” Preminger said.

“You compare the B’nai B’rith to the NAACP? The Jews are the best friends the Negro ever had.”

“We vote Democratic. We got a name for ourselves all over the world as nigger-lovers.”

“Just more anti-Semitism,” someone said sadly.

“I’m not going to change your minds,” Preminger said. “Why don’t we just stop talking about it?”

“That’s the ticket,” Lena Jacobson said. “He’s young, he’s an idealist. Leave him to heaven.”

During dinner they wanted his opinions on Vietnam, on welfare and minimum hourly wage laws. What concerned them most, however, was the campus situation — SDS, the Weathermen. Why were they so angry? They saw him, he realized at last, as a representative of the younger generation. He was there to be baited.

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

“Drugs. What about drugs?”

“I take ten milligrams of Coumadin.”

“You hear? He admits it.”

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

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

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

“You know an awful lot about it.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.”

“Do you drop acid?”

“I’m thirty-seven years old.”

“This boy saved my life,” Lena pleaded.

“It’s true,” Jack said. “No more.”

They ate the rest of the meal in silence.

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

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

“The blond?”

“Sherman. Milton’s grandson.”

“Who’s Milton?” a man asked.

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

“I said, who’s Milton?”

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

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

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

“But what’s so brilliant about him?”

“He’s brilliant. A genius.”

“How?” asked Preminger.

“How? How what?”

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

“That’s right. He’s very brilliant.”

“How?”

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

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

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

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

“Hey, you,” Jack Jacobson said.

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

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

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

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

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

“How?”

“He’s got a house.”

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

“He’s got fifteen rooms.”

“So?”

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

“Then why do they call it a hill?”

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

“How is he brilliant?”

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

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

“I mean he’s brilliant.”

“How? How is he brilliant?”

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

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

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

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

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

“What makes him brilliant?” Preminger was shouting.

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

“So?”

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

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

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

“Mr. Harris,” Preminger said.

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

“Can I ask you something?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was from Evelyn Riker.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Very truly yours,

Evelyn

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Taylor was in probate,” someone said.

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

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

“Possession is nine-tenths of the law.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Now they ask him.”

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

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

“The kids don’t come to Florida.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m happy with this one.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Bernadine’s going to give me Fridays.”

“I thought she goes to Dorothy on Fridays.”

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

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

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

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

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

“You’re as old as you feel.”

“You know something?”

“What’s that?”

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

“Sunrise, sunset.”

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

“Terrific.”

“Cold?”

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

“I’m going in. I got to take a leak.”

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

“That’s right.”

“May I ask a personal question?”

“What I had to give for it?”

“If you don’t mind.”

“Thirty-two hundred fifty above cost.”

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

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

“So he did?”

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

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

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

“They gave him to eat curry? A baby?”

“They’re very modern people.”

“Feldman?”

“I’m sunbathing. I’m getting a tan.”

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

“Yeah. Right.”

“So?”

“Sew buttons. So? So what?”

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

“That again.”

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

“A week from Thursday.”

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

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

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

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

“Queens and jacks?”

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

“It’s my money.”

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

“Excuse me for living.”

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

“We’ll wait.”

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

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

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

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

“Where do you get all this stuff?”

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

“On toothpaste?”

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

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

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

“I’m gonna go in. Is it cold?”

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

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

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

“You?”

“Why not?”

“You got cards?”

“Upstairs.”

“I don’t know.”

“Come on.”

“All right.”

“If I could find a buyer I’d sell.”

“Where would you go?”

“That’s the thing.”

“Did you hear about Ruth-Ann?”

“What about him?”

“Packed it in. Sold out to Tom-Ted.”

“Her? I don’t believe it. Where’d you hear?”

“Mary-Sue.”

“The auto battery manufacturer?”

“Yeah.”

“Rob-Roy told me the business was doing so well.”

“Rob-Roy’s giving up the restaurant.”

“What’ll she do?”

“She’s going with Chuck-Burger.”

“Well, listen,” he heard someone next to him say, “this is costing you money.” It was the excuse people made when they wanted to get off the long-distance telephone.

“So your problems are solved. You’ll have Bernadine on Fridays.”

“Do I need her? What’s the matter, the place is so big I can’t do it myself? Twenty minutes in the morning and it’s straightened out. It’s good enough.”

“Then why bother?”

“Because,” the woman said, “because I miss her. I miss the company.” She was crying.

“Harris. At the Standard Club. A tartan cummerbund. A powder-blue dinner jacket. The orchestra was playing ‘My Fair Lady.’ ”

“The summer’s over.”

“I know.”

“October, November — they can shove it. The Chicago winter. It’s not a heated garage. All night you’re up wondering will it start, won’t it start? Scraping the goddamn frost off the goddamn windshield with the little goddamn piece of plastic like a tiny red goddamn comb. Cold weather.”

“At least in Miami that’s one worry you don’t have.”

“If it ain’t one thing it’s another. In Miami if it don’t hit seventy one day it breaks your heart.”

“That’s if you’re on vacation. When you live there all year round you don’t worry about it so much.”

“In the summer you step out the door you get cancer from the sunshine.”

“Everything’s air-conditioned. In the gas stations the toilets are air-conditioned.”

“There’s Portuguese man-of-war in the ocean.”

“Who goes in the ocean? You have a pool. In the winter it’s heated.”

“Who you kidding? If it ain’t one thing it’s another.”

The speaker sighed. “They’re we’re agreed,” he said.

“Did I tell you,” someone said, “they want me to go into the hospital for tests?”

There was no talk of their children or grandchildren. As if they did not exist. Where were the photographs that should have been passed around? The color snaps, indistinguishable one from another, of four- and five-year-olds, scowling on lounges in pine-paneled dens, their pale skins bluely cosmetized by inexpert photography? Why did no one speak of these children? Why didn’t they speak of their sons and daughters, those scattered accountants and lawyers and professors and journalists? Why did they deny them? (He’d met Audrey of Audrey-Art Underwear, a woman now, old as himself. They existed.) Where was their famous doting, that far-fetched fanclub love? And who talked of recipes, who spoke up for food? Who limned soup and catalogued vegetables? Who advised on meats, the secret special places of the beasts where the sweetness lingered and the juices splashed? Where was one who would describe dessert, who would convey custard and teach sponge cake and the special creams, who dealt in celery as if it were currency? (And where, for that matter, did Wall Street figure, over-the-counter, the American Exchange?) How was business? But most of all, what about the children? Who’d blacklisted them? Why? We exist.

“Whose rule,” Preminger spoke up, “whose rule was it that there are no guests? Who made that up?” He spoke louder than he’d intended, for he heard his question make a hole in their conversation, his voice overriding theirs like a bulletin. “Who made that rule? Who agreed to such an arrangement? I demand an answer!” he shouted. “Who decided that Sunday rules shall apply all week long? Who banned the children? Who decreed that flesh and blood shall be snubbed? Who’s responsible?”

“That’s just management policy, son,” a man said quietly. “It makes good sense when you consider that this one pool has to service all three buildings.”

“Crap,” Preminger yelled back. “Until the last day or so it’s been practically empty. Why would you agree to such a disgraceful idea? Unless you really wanted it that way. Am I right?”

“Easy, there, fella.”

“My father would never have agreed to the setup. And he’d have had pictures of us. He’d have passed ’em around. He’d tell you about my days on the circuit.”

“That’s right,” Ed Eisner said, “he was very proud of you.”

“Shit,” Preminger shouted, “he never said a word. Like the rest of you. You should see the place. A swinger. He had hair like a pop star.”

“Come on,” someone said, “Why don’t you take it easy? Are you feeling okay? You want a glass of water?”

“I feel terrible,” Preminger said quietly. He was very calm now. His outburst had shocked him, and he was deeply embarrassed. “Look,” he said gently, “I am deeply embarrassed.” He stood up. “I wish you’d try, if not to forget, then at least to forgive my outburst. If you no longer wish me to serve as your lifeguard I understand and will, of course, step down. Indeed, in the light of my exhibition just now I seriously question my capacity to supervise this pool. Indeed, rather than charge you for imposing Sunday rules I suppose I ought to thank you. It was probably one of the more fortunate aspects of my position that the rule was imposed. I am, as some of you may know, a terribly unhappy man. I’m thirty-seven, ripe for conventional, even classical, introspection, a cliché of a man. What I would have you understand, however, is that if my case seems overwhelmingly typical, it is nevertheless unrelentingly true. Like all clichés. Perhaps a lot of what’s troubling me has something to do with my virginity. It may seem odd that someone my age should be a virgin. I didn’t want to be one, don’t want to be one. I assure you I have all the normal drives. Yet somehow it never really fell my way, just never came up. I don’t even think about it now.

“By moving here, I had thought to change my life, to alter its conditions by manipulating its geography, but I see now that this has little to do with it. As I overheard many of you saying yourselves. One’s mental health is like one’s height. Trauma isn’t in it. You’re happy or you’re not. And of course the details of my existence have done little to promote even the aura of tranquility. Though I’ve had my opportunities. I was, for example, a minor figure on the lecture circuit at one time, but my career was manufactured, almost an accident. I was trading on an extremely limited inventory. The fault was largely mine, though not exclusively. Economic factors and the general climate of taste probably contributed at least a little to my undoing, as well as the political circumstances of our serious times. I have no clear ability to judge. Nevertheless I once had a small reputation. Now of course my name is faded. I’m very lonely, and not in the best of health. A few years ago I suffered a heart attack. The doctors all assured me that an attack that comes so prematurely can be a kind of blessing in disguise, for it warns its victims that something is radically wrong with his life. Shit, I knew that.

“Now I’m having a nervous breakdown. It’s as real as sore throat. A nervous breakdown. Though you know, it’s very odd, I can truthfully say that I feel no different than I did before. I’m as unhappy as I was before, but no unhappier. Nor have I misrepresented myself in any way. Except, of course, for that wild talk about my father a few moments ago. These are all things I would tell you privately did we but know each other better. If it weren’t for my nervous breakdown I wouldn’t be talking to you like this. So I guess the essence of a nervous breakdown is that it makes you go public, like floating an issue of stock.

“Now you must excuse me. Stay well. If you haven’t got your health, what have you got?…Your good name?”

He went upstairs, politely smiling his refusal to those who tried to help him.

Evelyn Riker’s second letter was waiting for him, slipped under the door. He opened it calmly, astonished that madness was so rational. He could read. He remembered everything. He could turn the key in the lock, change his things, hang them up. He could empty his bladder. Remember to lift the seat, flush the toilet. How was he mad, then? In what did it subsist? Unhappiness. Unhappiness was his only trauma, his single symptom. Misery as fixed and settled as his overbite, as incapable of being altered as of making parallel lines meet in a painting by staring at them. He was weeping. Even as he read Evelyn’s letter — the hope it gave him suffusing him like an injection — he could not stop crying.

Dear Marshall,

It was sweet of you to answer, but my goodness, a wire! It must have cost you a fortune. Or are you one of those big spenders for whom money is just a convenience, there to enjoy when you have it but not much missed when it’s gone? I rather wish my husband had been more like that. To tell you the truth, money was one of the biggest bones of contention that arose between us. I don’t mean that Jerry was stingy or I profligate. Indeed, if anything he was more than generous. It’s just that having made a big cash outlay — the condominium, for example — he could never stop worrying about where he would get the wherewithal to justify his expenditures. He was the only man I’ve ever known who worried about what inflation would do to his pension when he had to retire in twenty years! Naturally enough, this quality in him led to bickering between us. I know he didn’t mean them, but sometimes the man would say awful things to me, dangerous things for a man to say to a woman, or for a man to say to anyone, for that matter.

Yes. He could follow. The words made sense. Then how was he mad?

One of the biggest blow-ups of all was after he bought a new car one time, a car that was far too big for us, incidentally, and which as a matter of fact I had counseled him against purchasing. I took it out one day, and while I was shopping someone skinned our rear fender and put a nasty dent and scratch in it, about a half inch deep and as long as your arm. A brand new expensive car. Can you imagine how this would make you feel?

Yes, he could. Then how was he mad?

When I discovered this after I came back out to the parking lot I naturally hoped that the driver might have left a card with his or her name and telephone number on it. If it had been me — after all, one is insured for this sort of thing — I would certainly have done so. I looked everywhere, but there was nothing. You can’t imagine how sorry I was that there were retractable windshield wipers on this particular model, for otherwise the culprit might have left a message under the wiper blades. Of course I had shut the windows and locked the doors when I went in to do my shopping, so he couldn’t have left it on the seat even if he had wanted to. To make a long story short, I looked everywhere, in the grillwork, even in the gas cap, the crease where the trunk joins the body — everywhere one could conceivably leave a notice. I know what you’re thinking, that I was naive to expect someone to offer information against himself, but that’s the way I am, willing to think the best of others till I’m proved wrong. Well, I was certainly proved wrong that time.

At any rate, when I told Jerry what had happened he didn’t blow up at me. He was very understanding about the accident and said that such a thing could have happened to anyone. Where the fight started was when I suggested we put in an insurance claim anyway. We had fifty dollar deductible and a scratch like that would cost a lot more to repair. They probably would have had to put on a whole new fender. It wasn’t even the fifty dollars we’d have had to lay out that bothered Jerry. We have a vandalism clause in our policy, and I think the insurance adjuster would have gone along with the idea the gash may have been inflicted by vandals, but Jerry was afraid that after paying the claim they would drop us. He said it was just this sort of nickel and diming that upset insurance people the most. And he stood pat. I couldn’t budge him. I thought it was ridiculous to drive around in a beautiful new car with an imperfection like that, and I told him so, but all he was worried about was that the insurance company would abandon us and that he’d have to pay a higher premium to get reinsured with a high risk company. We had words — hard, bitter words — but Jerry was stubborn. After that, cuts and dents grew on the car like a disease — and I wasn’t the one who put them there — but Jerry would never put in a single claim. I saw that it was a neurotic behavior pattern and — what can I tell you? — the marriage went to pieces. Ultimately he left me. That’s when I became friendly with your father.

Anyway, I didn’t mean to burden you with all this detail. The point is that I don’t want you to spend your money on telegrams. We’re neighbors. As you say in your telegram, we live a few doors down the hall from each other. Actually, it made me very upset to see that wire. My hands shook so when it was delivered that I couldn’t even open it. I thought something had happened to Jerry. We’re estranged, but the man is still my husband. When you’ve lived with someone for almost twenty years you don’t forget him just like that. Also — I’ll be very candid — there was something too importunate about sending me that wire. What would have been perfectly acceptable in a letter seemed, frankly, “overzealous”—this is the best word I can think of — set down in a telegram. (Perhaps this is what McLuhan means when he says that “the medium is the message.”) Maybe I share some of the responsibility for this. I think I’ve left you with certain faulty impressions, and I really believe I ought to undo these if we are to become friends. We simply have to set out on a footing of mutual understanding and respect. It’s no accident that my first reaction, my instinctive reaction, to your wire (after I saw that it was not bad news about Jerry), had to do with the importunity I have already spoken of.

If you will forgive my opening up a subject which I know must be a very sore one with you — if you will permit me, this is, to probe areas which your normal filial affections and recent harrowing loss must certainly have left tender — I will be even franker. Perhaps you are wondering why I say my “instinctive” reaction…

Yes. He was wondering that. That’s what he was wondering. Then it was normal to so wonder. Then how was he mad? He wiped the tears from his eyes. When would they stop? He has lost a pound of tears so far. When would he begin to weep blood, when vision itself, weeping light till none was left to weep, then weeping dimness, then darkness? Then what? Calcium, marrow, all the chemicals of his body, all the juices of his glands. Then how was one mad who could parse sequence like a scholar at the blackboard? Weeping hair, skin, bone, gut, shit, nails and all, weeping his life and, when there was no more left, weeping death and even time.

…and here I will have to make certain “confessions” which I have not offered earlier — out of fear and jealousy and my own sense, however misguided, of protecting you, I suppose.

Yes. Protect me, he thought, weeping.

I never lost your father’s key, and it is not altogether true that I never used it. I did use it—once—the night of Dad’s death. Phil had begun to call me on the telephone at all hours. Sometimes my daughter would answer. She knew his voice, though he was so nervous about what he considered our “relationship” that if I wasn’t home he would try to disguise it or pretend that he’d gotten a wrong number, representing himself to her as a merchant or salesman or some such nonsense. But Sheila is no dummy. She knew his voice and began to suspect things between us that simply weren’t true, a relationship as fictitious as Phil’s voices. He made her very uncomfortable, and I warned him that if this continued I would have to seek other outlets. It wasn’t the neighbors I cared about — I had weathered their gossip and scorn when Jerry left me — but my daughter’s opinions did matter. That was all. The mother of a child from a broken home taking up with a man almost old enough to be her grandfather! That wasn’t the case, it was never the case, but from the peculiar ways Phil behaved she had, I suppose, every reason to suspect it was. I told him in letters that his behavior must change. (Letters I did not read to you that day.) But despite my entreaties it didn’t. He tried openly to hold my hand at the swimming pool. If I went into the water Phil went in too, cavorting, swimming between my legs, coming up behind me and diving down and raising me to his shoulders, touching me beneath the water where he thought it would not be noticed, challenging me to races and giving me headstarts so that he could catch up to me and make rough body contact, dunking me, pulling off my bathing cap and teasing — all masquerading as play but clearly the sublimated physical activity of a youth a third his age. It got so bad that I couldn’t go into the water, or I’d use my red guest band to swim at other pools. I couldn’t elude him. He followed me.

I liked Phil. All this was only toward the end. Even then, when he was calm we got along beautifully. He was a fabulous conversationalist. But he became less and less calm. I decided that I had to return his key. (Which, thank God, Sheila never knew I had.) To return it in a letter, however, seemed too cold and cruel. After all, we would still be neighbors and have to live on the same floor. To pass it to him at the pool was out of the question. I thought someone would see me, or that he might make a scene. I knew that the only way was to bring it to him, and that’s what I did that night — the night he died.

Sheila was watching TV in her room, and I told her I was going out for a while. I made up some excuse — I don’t even remember what it was. I came down the hall and rang Dad’s bell. There was no answer, though I could hear music playing inside the apartment from Phil’s new stereo, the Beatles, I think. I pressed the doorbell twice more, and when there was still no answer I let myself in with the key.

Your father was in his shorts on the couch. They were these skimpy silky bikini things and I would have left at once, but not after I saw his face. He looked awful. I asked what was the matter and he said he was a little uncomfortable. Naturally I forgot about the key; I must have slipped it back into my purse. I went over to him and he asked me if I would turn off the phonograph. He said he was very tired. I did what he asked and returned to him. He was sweating terribly, his face was pale, and it was clear to me that he was very ill. But even then he misunderstood why I was there. He tried to smile. “Evelyn,” he said, “this wasn’t how I expected it would be. I’m sorry it turned out like this, kid.” I told him I thought we’d better call a doctor, but he said no, he thought it might be only a little indigestion and that he was already beginning to feel a little better.

Marshall, he was — hard. I told him he’d better just lie still and that I’d try to get some help, and that’s when he became aroused. I was very frightened, but to tell you the truth I was more afraid of what could happen to him if I struggled with him than of anything that might happen to me. I held him up, and all the time he was kissing and touching me, and to calm him I said we’d better go into the bedroom. I wanted to get him to lie down, you see. I helped him into the bedroom and that’s when he asked to make love to me. I told him it was crazy, that we had to wait until he was better. I didn’t want to upset him. I promised that if he let me call the doctor I’d wait with him in bed until the doctor came. He agreed, and I called the number he gave me and got the answering service. I told the girl it was an emergency, and she said she’d get the doctor at once.

Then your father made me keep my promise to lie down next to him. Marshall, he had taken off his shorts. He was very excited because he didn’t understand why I had come to his apartment, and he just kept — well, thanking me. I let him undress me, and because he was so ill and moved so slowly I actually helped him. I threw my clothes off as if they were on fire, and I suppose this excited him even more. I got him into position and all I could think was, I don’t know, that this was better than that he should he hard, that that would be a terrible strain on his heart, and I wriggled like a mad woman because all I wanted was to bring him off. He came almost at once, and he died on top of me.

I got out. I couldn’t wait for the doctor. I cleaned his penis. I looked around for any evidence, and destroyed it. I ran away.

That’s the story. Now you understand why I couldn’t come to the chapel or the funeral. That’s the story. Please don’t answer this letter.

There was a postscript: “I’ll get the key back to you.”

Then how was he mad? Didn’t he see the inconsistencies in her letter? “I don’t want you to spend your money on telegrams. We’re neighbors. As you say in your telegram, we live a few doors down the hall from each other.” And all that stuff about “if we are to become friends.” If she’d looked for evidence, why hadn’t she taken the letters with her? And after telling him the whole story about that night why hadn’t she simply enclosed the key? He could drive a truck through her ambivalences. Then how was he mad? And what about his reactions to what he’d been told? Were they mad? Was it mad to be stirred by that part where his father went swimming through her legs? He was hard as the mourner’s bench he sat on when he read that. Was that mad? Or his own ambivalences, his disgust and jealousy at her final revelations, were they mad? Was the awful pity he felt? Then how had his nerves broken down? His inkling that the key might still turn in his lock — was that nuts? Or, modifying inkling to simple bald hope that it would, was that? If only he could stop this damn weeping.

No longer were the tears coursing down his cheeks like anguish in a prizewinning photograph; now he was sobbing, bellowing, howling. He stuffed a handkerchief into his mouth. Choking on it, he pulled it out. (Was that, self-preservation normal as apple pie, was that?) He was astonished to be insane yet see so clearly, every reaction fitted immaculately to its cause like a Newtonian law.

He huddled on the mourner’s bench and had an idea. He phoned Evelyn. She answered on the second ring. (Was it nuts to suspect that having slipped the letter under his door she would be waiting for his call?)

“It’s Marshall,” he sobbed. “I got your letter.”

“Oh.”

“Yes. I got it. I read it. I understand.”

“Oh.”

“I agree about the telegrams.” He was squalling into the phone, He made a stutterer’s effort to speak plainly and said goodbye clear as a bell.

He waited on the mourner’s bench for three hours but she never came. He’d shown every patience, giving her time to do the supper dishes, to think up something to tell Sheila, to wait until Sheila was asleep, to prepare herself. He didn’t even leave the bench to urinate, fearing that he wouldn’t hear her timid knock in the toilet. All hope left him. He understood her reluctance; he understood everything. And he stopped crying.

He stepped out onto the balcony. He saw the skyline, the lighted windows that ran across the horizon like a message, like signal fires of the abandoned on those desert isles of his hypotheses, like bonfires on mountain tops for the search planes to see. He saw all the warehouses, office buildings, hotels and apartments. He saw the houses and condominiums, service flats, bed-sitters, kips and billets. He saw barracks and bunkers and chambers in university and wards in hospitals, saw all places where being lodged, those visible and those invisible — rooms underground, basements, shelters, code and map rooms, vast silos beneath the desert and under the badlands, Sweden’s civil defenses, the booths in tunnels where officers stood watching the traffic, the cars in those tunnels, the passengers snug in their moving envelopes of space, subway trains and staterooms beneath the water line — saw the cabins of jets and two-seaters and the berths in trains, their club cars and coaches, the locked toilets on buses and the vans of trucks, the wide ledge behind the driver where the helper snuggles. There were palaces and theaters, arenas in the open air, auditoriums where people sat listening to orchestras, stalls and dress circles and private boxes and the gods. There were pits where technicians recorded those performances and prompter’s boxes in theaters where a man, crouching, followed what the actors were saying, his fingers moving along the lines of the script as if it was in Braille. There were caves. There were mud huts and huts of straw and the hogans of Navahos, all the earth’s vulgate architecture, its mounds and warrens, Rio’s high favellas and Hong Kong’s sea-level houseboats. There were cellblocks in prisons and the tiger cages of solitary. The world was mitered, walls and floors and ceilings, angled as the universe and astronomy, jointed as men.

There were balconies like this one he stood on, with railings like this one. He raised one leg over and now the other. Intestate, sitting there for a moment perfectly balanced, he pushed off gently and began his fall.

As he plunged he addressed the condominium, quoting from the lecture he had been preparing. “From what incipit, fundamental gene of nakedness,” he gasped, “came, laboring like a lung, insistent as the logical sequences of a heartbeat, the body’s syllogisms, this demand for rind and integument and pelt?” But it was too difficult. His velocity shoveled the words back into his mouth, the air that forced itself into his lungs canceling his breath. All he could manage at last, with great effort, the greatest he had ever made, were individual words.

“Cage,” he shouted. “Net,” he screamed. “Pit, sheath, vesicle, trap,” he roared above gravity. “Cell, cubicle, crib and creel.” He tried to expel the air that suffused him, billowing his body like a flag. “Nest,” he yelled, “carton, can.” His descent pulled the wind, igniting it like a fire storm. “Jakes,” he squealed, “maw!” But it was too much. He could open his mouth but couldn’t close it. So in the split seconds he had left he had to think the last. And the hole, he thought, the hole I’m going to make when I hit that ground!