Boswell (16 page)

My dinner came and I ate it without enjoyment and drank the two bottles of wine sullenly.

I called the desk. “This is the transient in 814. That adds up to thirteen, did you know that?”

“I beg your pardon, sir?”

“I was in your elevator some while ago,” I said, “looking at the control panel.”

“Is something wrong, sir?”

“You can drop the sir, buddy. We’re all of us transients, you know.”

“Sir?”

“Have it your way,” I said. “There’s no thirteenth floor.”

“Sir?”

“There’s no thirteenth floor. There’s a twelfth floor and a fourteenth floor, but there’s no thirteenth floor.”

“Sir,” the clerk said, humoring the drunken transient from out of town, “that’s standard hotel policy. Many of our guests are superstitious and feel—”

“I know all about it,” I interrupted him, “but that’s the most important floor of all.”

The clerk smiled over the telephone.

“Get it back, do you understand?”

“I’ll see about it, sir.”

“Thank you,” I said politely, “I thought you should know.” I hung up and immediately remembered something I had forgotten. I called the desk clerk again.

“Transient in 814,” I said.

“Yes sir,” the clerk said. He was getting a little tired

of me. Fun was fun, but there was a convention in town.

“Has John Sallow checked into this hotel?”

The clerk brightened over the telephone. “Just one moment, sir, I’ll check that for you.”

The line went dead.

“I’m sorry, sir,” the clerk said in a moment, “no such party is registered at the Missouri.”

“Standard hotel policy, I suppose, like the foolishness about the thirteenth floor. Superstitious guests, I suppose.”

“Shall I check my reservations, sir?” the clerk asked coldly.

* “No,” I said. “If he shows up, have him get in touch with the transient in 814.” I hung up.

I found a Yellow Pages in the night stand by the telephone, opened it to
Hotels
and called them all alphabetically. Sallow was nowhere. Sure, I thought, what do you think, the Angel of Death needs a room? How would he sign the register? He’s no transient.

I went to bed.

In the gym at eleven o’clock the next morning I went up to Lee Lee Meadows, the promoter. Lee Lee was wrapped in a big orange camel’s hair coat and was talking to a reporter. “Lee Lee, is it true you can go fourteen days without water?” the reporter was asking.

“Lee Lee,” I said, “I’ve got to speak to you.”

“I’m talking to the press here,” Lee Lee said.

The reporter caught the eye of one of the wrestlers and walked over to him. Lee Lee raised his hand to object, but the reporter smiled and waved back. Lee Lee turned to me. “Yeah, well, what’s so important?”

“Is Sallow in town yet? I tried all the hotels.”

Lee Lee frowned. “He’ll be when he’ll be,” he said.

“I’ve got to see him before the match.”

Lee Lee looked at me suspiciously. “Hey, you,” he said, “what’s the excitement?”

“I just have to see him.”

“Yeah? Bogolub called me about you. He said you ain’t too anxious to fight The Reaper. That you don’t want to lose.”

“No,” I said, “I want to fight him.”

“Because I got five tankers wild to be whipped by The Reaper.”

“No, no, Bogolub misunderstood,” I said. “I
want
to fight him.”

“The Reaper pulls here. You’re nothing.”

“Of course,” I said. “I want to see him because I thought of a new routine.”

“He’ll be when he’ll be.”

“He’s not in town?”

“How do I know where he is? He could be with a floozy on Market Street. What do I know if he’s in town? That old man. That’s some old man.”

“Lee Lee?”

“What?”

“This shit about The Grim Reaper, what do you think about it?”

“A terrific idea. Brilliant.”

“Then you don’t believe any of it?”

“Come on,” Lee Lee said.

“It’s just a stunt,” I said, “like The Masked Playboy?”

“Well, that I don’t know. I’ll say this. I been promoting matches in Louis since 1934. Reaper was one of my first fighters.”

“That’s only sixteen years,” I said.

“Kid,” he said. “Kid, he was an old man
then!”

I worked out listlessly with some of the other wrestlers on Friday’s card and at two o’clock I went back to my hotel.

I called all the hotels again. It took me an hour and a half. I left messages with all the clerks. Then I slept. I dreamt fitfully of John Sallow and awoke at ten with a headache. I wondered if I had been awakened by the telephone. I had to talk to him. Oddly, I realized, I was no longer worried about the fight. It was Sallow himself that interested me. I was curious about
him.
Oh, Herlitz, I thought wearily, I thought all that was over. But then I thought, no, that business wasn’t behind me yet. It never would be. The Masked Playboy unmasked. It was all true about me, as true as it may have been about Sallow. These things were no accidents. Gorgeous George is gorgeous. We were like movie stars playing ourselves. I was, spiritually at least, a rich man’s son, a bored darling of no means, of no means at all. The last two years had been nothing more than an extended vacation from myself. But Sallow had suddenly changed all that. I was too interested in his curious achievement. I was a little ashamed, but there it was. Was I, after all, a mere seeker of the picturesque? That’s what my sloppy concern with greatness boiled down to. Now my morbidness had led me back to myself. Transients within transients. Okay, I thought, here is where I live. Now just let him call.

I didn’t leave my room for fear I would miss his call. Again I had room service bring my dinner. I had them send up the papers, too, and I pored hungrily over the society pages and gossip columns. Where I lived, I thought. St. Louis was an old town. It had an aristocracy. Even after two years, their names were still familiar to me. I saw a photograph of Virginia Pale Luddy, the daughter of Roger and Eleanor Pale Luddy. I called Information, but it was an unlisted number. I asked Information to speak to her supervisor. I lied, I hinted at emergencies, but she wouldn’t give me the number.

“May I speak to
your
supervisor, please?” I said icily.

“I’m sorry, sir. It’s after midnight. If you’ll call back in the morning you can speak to Mr. Plouchett.”

“How do you spell that?” I demanded.

Of course I didn’t call Mr. Plouchett in the morning. It was just a threat. To get in shape. I was out of condition; all that was working for me was my will. I couldn’t even generate any of my old belief that something would happen. Almost fondly I remembered that old foolishness, a faith in the thermodynamics of forever ripening conditions. But that was in another physics. Now I could not even seduce a supervisor into revealing an unlisted number. What I might have said to Virginia Pale Luddy had I actually reached her I could not even think about. That was a luxury which was beyond the hope of any merely
masked
playboy. At least, I consoled myself, I knew where I stood, and, more vaguely, what I stood for. I could take it up again soon.

I waited for The Reaper’s call. It did not come. I fell asleep.

That night as I lay fully clothed upon my bed, dressed in newer versions of the clothes I had worn in the schoolyard all those years before, Herlitz appeared to me in a dream.

It was the oddest dream. I could see just his face. It never moved; it hung, suspended, on its dream horizon and I could not tell whether it was only a picture of Herlitz’s face or the face itself. It did not move, but there was an astonishing depth to it. I could make out the shadowed interior of wrinkles, almost feel the oily film inside the ancient creases of the yellowing face. The expression was complex, but it seemed impatient, vaguely disappointed. Clearly it felt I was responsible for its displeasure, but when I addressed the face to plead my innocence it did not change. Suddenly I shifted. I accepted everything, all that it could possibly accuse me of had it spoken. I eagerly assented, heaping guilt upon myself as one rubs precious oils into his skin. I proposed charges and agreed to them, my remissness, my drifting, my lack of care. I promised that I would work again on my files, my journals, that I would go through them ruthlessly, excising all reference to the merely mediocre, that they would be updated. I confessed solemnly as I gazed at Herlitz through tears, as I spoke to him through a sob- choked throat, that I had been disloyal to his spirit and I promised to change. Still the face remained the same. Then I shifted a second time. I told the face to forget about me, to go about its more important business. What was I, anyway, I demanded. A mistake, an experiment gone sour—all scientists had them, I reassured it. Let it cut its losses and be at peace. It had Schmerler, the German army, the famous Harvard classes of 1937 through 1945, the man in monorails. What did it need Boswell for? I answered my own argument. It wasn’t true about the one sheep out of the ninety, nine that went astray. That was lousy shepherdry, I insisted, God’s awful agriculture; returns diminished, I reminded it. The face remained unchanged. It hung above me like a clouded moon, still eternal, in suggestive incoherent depths. All right, I said at last, tomorrow was Friday. I would fight the Angel of Death for it. How was that? It wasn’t what we had agreed upon. I knew that, I said, but things change, conditions ripen. I hadn’t forgotten that I wasn’t a great man, I told it. Sandusky had taught me that much. (And, incidentally, how was Sandusky? Was he getting on? Was there a gymnasium for him, I asked slyly.) And anyway, I would probably lose. If I did lose, that would take care of the question of my greatness permanently, right? The face did not respond. Of course, I realized, it’s a picture after all. How could a picture respond? Just my guilty imagination groveling before a graven image. Right? Right? God damn it, right? Well, shine on, harvest moon, I said, and go screw yourself. It was useless to plead with a madman, I told it, and resolved to wake up.

I struggled out of my sleep like a person trying to move one particular finger on a hand that has gone numb. The strings are cut, I thought. Someone’s cut my strings. I looked quickly up at the face; I was positive I would catch it in a smirk. It had not changed, and I returned sadly to the job of loosening myself, and finally found myself and floated up to myself as sad in wakefulness as I had been in sleep. Instantly I knew the meaning of the dream.

Conditions do not ripen. Things do not happen. Nothing happens. We are like poor people on Sunday. We’re all dressed up but we have no place to go.

I chose my clothes slowly, ceremonially, changing from one pair of seven-ninety-five slacks to another pair of seven-ninety-five slacks, like a matador into his suit of lights.

I called the desk. “Are there any messages for me?”

“Who is this, sir?”

“Boswell. Eight-fourteen.”

“We would have called you if there were, sir.”

“Of course,” I said, “thank you.”

I could not eat breakfast. I went to the gymnasium.

“Is Sallow in the city yet?” I asked Lee Lee Meadows.

“As a matter of fact, yeah,” he said.

“Did you tell him I wanted to see him?”

“He said he’d see you tonight.”

“Where is he staying?”

“Ah, come on, Boswell.
I
don’t know. How should I know where that old man stays?”

“You knew I was looking for him,” I said.

“Tonight he’ll be in the Arena. Conduct your business there.”

When I went back to the hotel it had begun to rain. From my room I called all the hotels again. He wasn’t registered.

“That’s impossible,” I yelled at the desk clerk when I came to the last hotel on my list.

At five o’clock the phone rang. I grabbed it eagerly. “Sallow?” I shouted into it.

“This is the room clerk, sir. There are some people down here to see you.”

“John Sallow? Is John Sallow there?”

The clerk put his hand over the mouthpiece. “No, sir,” he said at last. “It’s a man and a woman and a little boy.”

“No,” I said impatiently. “I never heard of them.” I slammed the phone back.

It was six o’clock and I had not eaten. I had better eat, I told myself. I went downstairs.

I had two steaks for strength. I chewed the meat slowly, the juices and fats filming my lips. I broke the bones and gnawed at the marrow inside. The waiter watched me, his disgust insufficiently masked by a thin indifference.

When I had finished my meat he came to stand beside my plate. “Will there be anything else, sir?” he asked.

“Bring me bread,” I told him.

“Bring me red tomatoes,” I said when I had chewed and swallowed the bread.

“Bring me ice cream in a soup bowl,” I said when I had sucked the tomatoes.

I went upstairs and lay down to wait while the food was being digested. At eight o’clock I took my white silk cape, mask, tights and shoes, wrapped them in newspaper, and went downstairs.

The doorman could not get me a cab in the rain. He held an umbrella over me and walked beside me to the corner, where I waited for a streetcar.

“I’m going to the Arena.” I told the conductor.

He saw the silk cape through a rent in the newspaper and nodded indifferently. I sat on the wide, matted straw seat, my shoes damp, their thin soles in shallow, steamy dirty puddles on the floor. Useless pink streetcar transfers, their cryptic holes curiously clotted with syrupy muck, floated like suicides. Colored round bits from the conductor’s punch made a dirty, cheerless confetti on the floor of the car. I read the car ads, depressed by the products of the poor, their salves for pimples, their chewing gum, their sad, lackluster wedding rings. A pale, fleshless nurse, a thick red cross exactly the color of dried blood on her cap, held up a finger in warning: “VD Can Kill!” spoke the balloon above her. To the side a legend told of cures, of four licensed doctors constantly in attendance, of convenient evening hours that enabled people not to lose a day’s pay, of treatments handled in the strictest confidence. There was a phone number and an address, the numerals and letters as thick and black as a scare headline. Above the address, floating on it like a ship tossing on heavy seas, was a drawing of a low gray building which looked like nothing so much as a factory where thin, underpaid girls turned out cheap plastic toys. Across the facade was the name: The St. Louis Institute for the Research and Treatment of Social Diseases and General Skin Disorders, Licensed 1928. Though I had never seen it, the advertisement seemed wearily familiar. Soon it was as if I had never
not
seen it. I closed my eyes and saw it on my lids.