Boswell (10 page)

“Have you been sick?” I said.

“Sick? Hah, what would you know about it?”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s my fucking constitution. With my trouble any other man would have been dead in eight months. Me? Three years now and God knows how long to go.”

I could not really believe in Sandusky’s illness. “Why don’t you kill yourself?” I suggested.

“Don’t be fresh,” he snapped. “Say, you got a lot of nerve going around telling people to kill themselves.” He considered me for a moment. “Did you really do that?” he asked.

“Do what?”

“That thing. The spike. Or was it a trick?” He meant the filings.

“It wasn’t a trick,” I said.

He shook his head in soft, sad wonder. “You’re the strongest,” he said. “You got any money for an old champion?” he asked plaintively. He pronounced it “champeen.” He was mocking me.

“Have you got any scrapbooks?” I asked.

“What’s that?”

“Scrapbooks. Pictures of yourself—from the old days.”

“Say, what’s the matter with you? Are you straight?”

“Please,” I said. “I’d like you to show me your scrapbooks.”

Sandusky laughed crudely. “Why?”

“I’m a professional,” I said. “It’s scientific.”

I’d had the idea when he told me about making the reporter use old photographs. There must be a scrapbook. That would be the thing—a guided tour. History is rare. It happens once. Who sits under the apple tree with Newton? For the sake of argument, you’re Moses’ closest friend. But when he climbs Mt. Sinai he climbs alone. A tourist sees the mountain, and some raggedy Arab leads him up and shows him a piece of broken stone. But it’s not the same thing. What do
places
mean?
Tombs? Relics?
What counts is people in the moment before history happens. So if Sandusky had a scrapbook it was not enough just to see it. I had to sit by while
he
turned the pages. Ersatz? Certainly, who says no? But I must always go as close as I can go, sidling up to the fearful edge of someone else like a man with vertigo. I tell you there is a sort of shame for me in not being one of the Trinity, such absolute chagrin in not being important that I can hardly look anyone in the eye. I am just Boswell the Big. What a burden for a strong man. In the presence even of Sandusky I felt a sort of awe; even an old success, a past, provocative as a scent, could hold me.

“So you’re a pro, what difference does that make? What can you learn from photographs?” Sandusky asked.

“That’s not it,” I said.
“Please.”

He threw up his hands. Under his sleeves, I knew, the flesh around his upper arms hung slackly, like an old woman’s on a bus. “I keep a few pictures,” he said. He seemed apologetic. “Loose,” he explained. “There’s nothing you could call a scrapbook.” He went to the chest of drawers and bent down.

He keeps them in the bottom drawer, I thought, where it’s uncomfortable for him to get at them. He’s humble. Not like Herlitz.

Having to stoop like that was obviously uncomfortable for Sandusky, and I stood to help him. He heard me move and looked back over his shoulder impatiently. “I can still pull out a damned drawer,” he said.

“Of course. I was just stretching.”

He scooped out a pile of pictures from beneath some papers—certificates and documents—and ran his hand over them rapidly, like a man in a gin rummy game looking through the discard pile. He picked out some pictures and pushed the rest back into a dark corner of the drawer. I saw the face of a woman on some of them—in my business one learns to look quickly—and wished that I might be able to look at these. (History is gossip, too, right? What stocks did Sandusky buy? Who was the beneficiary of those policies?) He picked up what was left and brought them back to the bed.

“These are just some poses,” he said shyly. “They’re corny, but you can get an idea.” I took the photographs from him and looked at them carefully and slowly. “Of course, I was pretty young when these were taken. A kid. Younger than you are, probably,” he said. “I was sort of a model in those days. That’s how I broke into the game.” As I looked at the pictures of Sandusky in his prime, of a near-nude Sandusky in postures of incredible stress, I was struck not so much by the contrast between the vigorous body of the young man and the collapsing presence sitting next to me, as by the complete lack of self-consciousness in the face on the photographs. There was an absorption so intense it might almost have been indifference. The young man wallowed in the sense of his body. A professional indeed. He was like a stage magician feigning surprise at the bunch of flowers suddenly appearing in his hand. I stared at the pictures, trying to get inside not his body, but the
achievement
of his body, the historic
occasion
of his body.

I must have embarrassed Sandusky. “They’re poses,” he said again.

“Yes,” I said hoarsely, “I know. Poses.”

I looked still more closely at the pictures. I examined them like a detective looking for clues. That’s what I was, a detective. I searched for the essence of Sandusky’s greatness, the achievement of man into meat. He had been like Christ, Sandusky. I saw that his shyness now was no swift accident, no result of the mere, though sudden, confrontation of the discrepancy between youth and age, wholeness and infirmity. It was there
then,
in the photographs. What I had mistaken for self-absorption, for pride, was a thorough selflessness. Sandusky, if he had ever existed, had disappeared behind that body, behind those eyes. His achievement was a self-sacrifice, not like my petty push-ups in the gym, a means to an end. Sandusky’s exercises were a means to
the
end. Remember, you must die. The corpse. The body. Sandusky remembered.

There was one photograph of Sandusky’s great, flexed right arm. In profile he gazed down at the bicep, transfixed. In another he stood with his fists on his hips. Where the elbows crooked, meaty slabs of muscle seemed to spill from the Niagara of his upper arms down into his forearms. His thumbs shoved against his rib cage, swelling his chest. In another he posed flatfooted, his toes lost, melted together in the overexposed photograph that washed his body in a frightening light like the brightness of a saint in a vision, the fingers of one hand splayed, rigid as steel tubes. His other hand grappled his wrist. I had the odd feeling that were he to let go he would have flown apart, the muscles flying outward from the center like shrapnel. This same quality of desperate containment pervaded all the photographs. Even in the pictures that showed Sandusky lifting heavy weights, he seemed not so much to be lifting them as burdened by them. In one his arms thrust defensively upward toward a huge bar bell. He squatted beneath the heavy weight obscenely, his knees spread wide and as high as his chest. His face was an agony, a passion of tears and pain, his breath heavy balls that threatened to pierce his cheeks, like the representation of Zephyrus in classic paintings. Lifting the weight, he seemed caught in some final humiliation. There were many such pictures. Another showed him upright, the weight high over his head. He almost seemed suspended from it. In the last photograph he actually
was
suspended. He hung in a device, his arms flung back across a horizontal bar, his shoulders wide as planks under the tremendous pressure. Wound about his entire body were thick chains from which, pendulant as gigantic metal fruit, were suspended huge weights like railroad wheels. Ah, I thought. Ah.

Sandusky looked over my shoulder. I heard his thick breath. “They’re poses,” he said. “When I was a kid.”

“Of course.”

“The weights came later. Stunts,” he said scornfully.

“Heroic feats.”

“Stunts. Lousy stunts. I liked the body-building, the training—that was good. You can see in the pictures. After I started doing the stunts I got fat, thick. I lost my definition.”

You never had any, Sandusky, I thought. That was your triumph. “That’s what made you The Great Sandusky,” I said.

“Oh, that. You want a laugh? Here, look at these.” He handed me two photographs I had not seen. One was of the lower part of his body, his waist and legs; the other was of everything above the waist.

I looked at the photographs and then at Sandusky. “They’re nice,” I said.

“Don’t you get it?” he said. “Don’t you get it?”

I shrugged.

“Lower Sandusky,” he said, pointing to the picture of his legs. Then, touching the other photograph,
“Upper
Sandusky! The town in Ohio! Get it?”

He handed me a full-length portrait of himself. “Greater Sandusky?” I said.

“Yeah,” he laughed, “yeah, yeah.
Greater Sandusky!”
He clapped me on the back. He laughed and laughed.
“Greater Sandusky,”
he wheezed through his laughter.

“Greater Sandusky.” I laughed with him. “Greater Sandusky! Greater Sandusky! Yeah. Yeah.”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Greatest
Sandusky!” I roared, putting all three pictures in a pile.

“Yeah,” he laughed,
“Greatest
Sandusky!”

He fell back on the bed, one arm flung heavily across his forehead. The other he raised weakly to his lips, trying to contain his laughter. He looked like someone who knew he would be sick, and the sight of him beside me, beneath me, the strong man wrestled to his bed by laughter, made me laugh more. You’d have had to have been there, I kept thinking, already trying to explain to someone else afterwards what it had been like. You’d have had to have been there. I tried to say “Greatest Sandusky” again to keep the joke going. Sandusky saw me and shook his head in warning. He took his hand away from his lips long enough to say, “Do-o-n’t. Doannt. Don’t. No. D-dd-doonnt.”

I was made ruthless by my laughter.
“Greatest
Sandusky,” I said.

He giggled.

“Greatest
Sandusky,”
I said.

Sandusky roared.

“Greatest Sandusky!”
I yelled at him.

He collapsed in laughter, the water rushing from his eyes. Startled, I saw that he looked like the Sandusky of old, the Sandusky of the photographs, his cheeks blown out in a rage of pain, his eyes drowned in his effort’s flood. Sandusky beneath the barbell, beneath the world’s gross weight, who held that weight from the ground, who was all we had between it and us. Sandusky’s face, its urgent effort, angered me. The heroic effort, the bald look of strain. There it was, the history I pursued and pursued, the moment I chased to see George do it. I gazed down at the straining Sandusky and wondered if it was possible to kill a man by making him laugh.

“Sandusky,” I yelled, screaming to make him hear me, “Sandusky, why does a strong man wear a jock?”

“D-d-do-on-nnt. Doannt.”

“To hold his bells up.”

“D-o-o-n’t. Ple-plee—leeze.”

“Mr. Sandusky, how is a strong man like a man who serves food in a restaurant?”

“D-on’t.”

“They’re both
weighters!”
He laughed, strangling, but I saw that he was regaining control. It was too bad, I thought. “If you can’t join ’em, kill ’em.” The new Boswell: Boswell the Bad. Aesthetically it was a pity. I could imagine Sandusky dead, and calling the police myself to report it, and their coming and finding Sandusky’s corpse. The Corpse of Sandusky, the heroic mold, all muscles and laughs. “Of course, gentlemen, he died out of his prime, but the essential materials are still there,” I would tell them, lifting a loose flap of skin and pulling it taut. “We could take him to a taxidermist and have him stuffed. It’s what
he
would want.” I would explain to the Inspector that I had told him a joke and he had died. But it was too late; already Sandusky was sitting up, his feet over the edge of the bed. He looked like someone who might wake with a hangover. He was disreputable, torn, and seemed as seedy as he had when I first came in.

“That was a good laugh,” he said stupidly. He smiled, remembering it.

“Yes.”

“It’s been years since I had a laugh like that.”

“It’s good for you to laugh like that once in a while. It clears the system.”

“Well, sure,” he said, “I know. When I was developing the body I used to make it a habit to read the joke books. It’s a very good lung exercise.”

“Is that a fact?” I said. When he said
“the
body” I felt another twinge of anger. He had confirmed again the selflessness of his life’s effort.

“I’m a little tired now,” he said apologetically.

“Sure,” I said, “I’ll get out of here.”

“Maybe you could come back another time. I enjoyed talking to you.”

“Sure,” I said, and got up.

“Wait a minute,” he said. He came over to me. “You might as well take one of these.” He handed me one of his poses.

“Oh, I couldn’t.”

“Sure,” he said. “What the hell.” He looked at me carefully. Then, to my surprise, he reached out and touched me. He put his hands on my arms, and stooping, slid his palm down my thighs. On his hands and knees he held my calf muscle, molding it, almost. “Say,” he said, looking up at me, “that’s all right.” He straightened up. “You got any pictures of the body? I’d like to see those calves.”

“Gee, I’m sorry, Mr. Sandusky, my photographer promised he’d have some ready for me yesterday, but he ran out of the high-gloss paper we use.”

“Oh,” he said, “I see.”

“Some should be coming in soon, though,” I said. “I could let you have a chest and legs and thighs, of course, and a neck that I’m very proud of. I saw the neck proofs yesterday when I went to the shop, and I think they’re terrific.”

“I’d like to see them,” he said. “The neck was always one of my weak spots, as you probably saw.”

“No,” I said, “you had a distinguished neck.”

“Well, it was
scrawny,”
he said, lowering his voice. “I was susceptible to sore throats and I could never exercise it the way I should have.”

“The way it deserved.”

“Yeah,” he said, “the way it deserved.”

“Well,” I said, shoving out my hand, “thanks
for
everything.”

“My pleasure,” he said.

I held up the photograph he had given me and grinned.

“Forget it,” he said, “my pleasure.”

Pleasure,
I thought, leaving him, what would you great men know about pleasure?