Boswell (31 page)

Morty came over. “Are you having a good time?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Would you mind if I danced with Thelma?”

“No, of course not.” I hadn’t known her name until Morty said it.

I watched them dancing with a sullen jealousy. It no longer seemed, as it had before, that there was abundance and all time in which to contemplate it and choose and enjoy.

When they stopped dancing Morty pulled the girl down beside him on the couch. She made no move to return to me or even to look in my direction. From where I sat I could watch them and hear them.

“I saw her again yesterday,” Morty said, “and I’m sure.”

The girl nodded seriously. “Do you want to talk about it?” she said. “Here?”

“What do I care?” Morty said. “Secrets are for kids. I love her. I’m fifty-six years old and for the first time in my life I understand what real love is. Isn’t that a strange thing?”

“Not so strange, Morty,” the girl said.

“I’ve had six wives. What kind of man am I? Didn’t any of those girls mean anything to me? Sex—it was just sex. I’m a licentious man.”

His arm was around Thelma’s shoulder. Casually he let it drop until his right hand lay lightly against her behind. “I was married one time to a full-blooded African princess who was six feet two inches tall. That was just sex. After all, what could a girl like that have in common with a Jewish guy from the Bronx? I respond to a certain wildness, I think. That’s a very dangerous thing. But with Dorothy none of that enters in; Dorothy’s a gentle person. She has three kids, you know. She’s very mature, very ladylike.”

“That’s wonderful, Morty, that you should find it at last,” the girl said.

“I bought her a pair of beautiful earrings. I’d like to show them to you and get your opinion before I give them to her.”

“I’d like to, Morty,” she said. “Do I know Dorothy?” she asked.

“It’s Dorothy Spaniels,” Morty said. “Professor Spaniels’ wife. In History.”

“My roommate has him for a class.”

“Sure,” Morty said. “That’s the one. Listen, ask your roommate what he’s like in class. You’ve got to know your enemy,” he said with a nervous little laugh.

“I will, Morty.”

“It’s easy enough to imagine that he’s a brute, but a lover isn’t always fair.”

“Does Dorothy love you, Morty?”

“We’ve slept with each other just once,” Morty said, “and she was as shy as a little girl. I had to do everything.”

“Poor Morty,” the girl said.

“I fell in love with her the first time I saw her.”

“Poor Morty.”

“Listen, it’ll work out, kid. When two people love each other the way Dorothy Spaniels and I do, nothing can keep us apart. Nothing.”

“She has three kids, Morty,” said the boy at my shoe.

“I love them,” Morty said. “I swear it to you. If I love them there’s no problem. I told Dorothy, ‘I’ll support them, I’ll treasure them as if they were my own.’”

I stood up and started for the door. Morty saw me and ran after me. “Where are you going?” he asked.

“It’s late, Morty,” I said. “I’ve got to get back to my hotel.”

“Well, listen,” he said, “give me a ring in the morning. I’d like to talk to you.”

“Sure, Morty.”

He put his hand on my sleeve. “You think I’m a prick,” he said.

“I don’t know, Morty,” I said. “You’re not careful.”

He took out his little box and started to put some pills in his mouth, then checked his motion and opened his palm and stared at the pills in his hand. “These keep me alive,” he said weakly.

“Then take them,” I said, and left.

Then, today, the strangest thing. When I got up I had a hangover. I am a strong man and unaccustomed to illness or to feeling weak. Because of its rareness I look upon a feeling of weakness as rather an odd sensation— the way other people might react to a shot of novocain.

Despite my hangover I felt a queer relief, a sense of having done with something, of good riddance. This is my invariable reaction when people have disappointed me, as though my growth is in direct proportion to the people I can do without.

This afternoon I went to the park and sat on one of the stone benches across the street from the art museum. It was one of those intense, brightly crisp afternoons that are like certain fine mornings. Ripeness is all, I thought, and wondered what that meant. In the dazzling acetylene sun I was almost but not quite warm.

I had a pencil and some paper with me and I started to write down the names of all the great men I had ever seen. It was exhausting work and soon too much for me. It was easier to put down the names of the great men I had known, but after a while it was even more difficult to decide what I meant by “known” than what I meant by “great.” It was depressing to think that Morty, although we had met less than a week ago, was the only great man I had ever
really
known. I decided I was being too restrictive, unfair to myself, and began to count the great men to whom I had spoken. There were plenty of these, but how did it mean anything if all I said was “Fine, thank you” to their mechanical “How are you?” on a receiving line? I changed my procedure again and began to write down the names of those men about whom I could say something as a result of our contact. It was soon clear that this wasn’t any more satisfactory than my other attempts. My senses are extraordinarily alive when I am in the presence of a great man. Frequently what he wears or what cigarettes he smokes or whether he smokes at all has almost as much weight with me as anything that happens between us. As real evidence of our contact this is worthless; I could tell almost as much from seeing a photograph. I decided to reduce the list by including only those men I had actually
touched,
but I soon saw that this made for serious omissions. I had never touched Stevenson, for example; I had never touched Thomas Mann. In despair I was about to throw away all my lists when the solution occurred to me. I made out a list of all those who had said my name.

Although it was Sunday and the day was fine there were not many people in the park. A few women pushed strollers. Occasionally a man with a fat Sunday paper would sit down on one of the benches to read, but the sun was too bright for reading and in a little while he would get up and walk to some more shady spot. Occasionally I heard shouts, and when I looked up I would see a group of boys playing on the wide stairs of the art museum or challenging each other to cross the building’s narrow marble ledges which began at the top of the stairs and framed the thin, pointless bas reliefs which ran like some dark undecipherable script around the building.

I was about to leave the park and begin the long walk back to the Love when for no particular reason I started to watch a compact little family that seemed to have just arrived in the park. There was a woman, a boy of about four, and the father (Why do I say “father”? He was a husband, too.) My attention was compelled—I don’t understand why—by the father. He was about twenty-nine or thirty and he wore a brownish herringbone overcoat. He had on rimless, vaguely archaic eyeglasses. I could see that he was a good, gentle man, someone who had never been in a fight, who had missed the war, who if he didn’t make much money now would one day make more. Though it was the father who had first drawn my attention, as I watched I began to feel strongly about all three of them. The father had a camera with him and was posing his family for photographs, protesting that they must not squint, that the sun had to be over his shoulder and in their eyes if the pictures were to be successful. Once he shouted impatiently at the little boy, who had moved just as he snapped the shutter. He used an old-fashioned box camera and peered seriously into the view finder fixed like a postage stamp in the upper right-hand corner of the camera. He said something I couldn’t hear, and the wife laughed and hugged the little boy. What was impressive were their clothes. All three were immaculately, fashionably dressed, and I had the impression that they were wearing everything for the first time. Perhaps it was this that made me feel so strongly about them, but whatever it was, I watched them with a powerful, unfamiliar emotion.

Pretending that it was an idle, spontaneous motion I got up, stretched and walked absently toward a bench closer to them. I stared at the wife’s wool suit, the soft fur collar around her neck, and at the rich, thick leather of the man’s shoes. The little boy wore knickers, an Eton cap, a white, stiff collar that reflected the sun and a paisley bow tie. The man had managed to purchase for himself and for his family one good thing each of everything, as in a collection of some sort. That was it, of course. He looked after his life, his family, his wardrobe, his apartment, as if he were the curator of some minor but almost definitive collection. Perhaps one room in their home was well furnished. I could see the wall-to- wall carpet, the expensive coffee table, the costly lamp, the custom-built sofa, the richly upholstered wing chair, the single oil painting in the good frame. In the bedroom their mattress had been specially constructed and cost three hundred dollars. They had a set of Rosenthal dishes, and silverware for four, to which they would add. They had all they needed, and a list of all they wanted, and slowly, piece by piece, brand name by brand name, consumer’s report by consumer’s report, they would add to this, fulfilling one dream by a carefully ordered scrapping or postponement of another. They would add as they went along, their way of life a demolishment of empty space, an ethic of filled drawers, closets, rooms, houses, devoted as misers to some desperate notion of accumulation.

The wife had a sort of turban on her head, and this, together with the father’s rimless glasses and the boy’s knickers, lent a peculiarly 1930-ish aspect to the family. But for them there had been no Depression, no war, no bereavement. Almost as if I knew their fate, I realized that the collection would never be completed, that they would grow tired of it first, that the little boy would either die or abandon them. I shuddered to see them. Their substantial laughter, their little private gestures of affection seemed hollow but tremendously brave.

The father took his son’s picture and then his wife’s and then the son and
the
wife’s together. The wife took her husband’s picture and then a picture of the father and the son. The father changed the film in the camera, going under a tree for the shade, and then came up to me.

“Excuse me,” he said. “I wonder if I could trouble you to take a picture of all three of us?”

“I’m not a very good photographer,” I said. This isn’t true; I have an eye for arrangement.

“Oh, that’s all right,” he said. “It’s just a box camera. There’s not much that could go wrong.”

“All right.”

I asked them to stand beneath a stone lion on the steps of the art museum, the child between them. “Why don’t you put the boy on the other side now, sir?” I said. “I’ll take a picture of you in the center.”

“Well, all right,” he said.

I took the picture.

“Let’s have one with Jerry on your side,” the father said to the woman.

“Is it too much trouble?” the wife asked me.

“No ma’am,” I said. “I’d be delighted.”

I snapped the whole roll. As soon as one picture was taken I suggested a pose for another. The family, contented, let me have my way. I made them stand in certain poses, one foot on a particular step, one arm touching the other’s shoulder at a precisely conceived angle. Suddenly selfless myself, suddenly concerned only to help them, to fix them in some permanently desirable position, to make them, on the steps of the museum, invulnerable as the stone lions, I caught them in all possible arrangements of their love.

Wild to stop time, I ran out of film.

I am awake now because I have been dreaming of this family. It seems the dream has lasted forever. In my dream one by one they sicken and die. Accidents happen to them and they lose their limbs, or passing each other like mechanical horses in a shipboard game, they age jerkily, irrationally, growing older or younger with no regard for the continuity of their relationship to each other. Suddenly the wife is an old woman, though the husband is as I saw him in the park. Or the son is his parents’ contemporary. I see their
things
age—the Husband’s good belt of soft Florentine leather cracks; the boy’s knickers tear; age erodes their silver. I see some new piece; a hand-carved headboard for the old bed, still in its crate. Now the family reappears; they are of drastically independent ages (though somehow all are old) and are strangely indifferent to each other.

Awake, I remember that in a few years I will be my father’s age when he died.

August 19, 1954. New York City
.

I’ve been trying to make better use of the daylight hours. Too many of my gams happen at night. People meet me then off the record, off the cuff, in a kind of democracy of evening when their time is discounted.

I’ve been going up and down the high-rent districts—Wall, Madison, Fifth, ducking in and out of Radio City (the scene of those old guided tours; how far I’ve come). I’ve been in the reception rooms now of many of the country’s most prestigious firms, and though I do not always meet I often get a chance at least to
see
their top men. (It never fails to strike me that these magnificent lives are built on simple profit and loss.) Brashness does not work here. It’s not like the movies. I must subdue myself in order to subdue others. It’s the high espionage of high finance, the subversion of self. Calmness is what these babies pay for.

However, this campaign isn’t organized yet. I have no really firm goals or procedures. Mostly I walk their neighborhoods like a kind of rube, my eyes on the tops of the buildings. On a hunch I pick one and go inside.

Yesterday I spotted a new one, all aluminum and glass, like some colossal upended tray of ice cubes. The impression was that the books all balanced, that I would even be allowed to examine them if I liked. The lobby was vast, a marbled, climateless hall which gave me the feeling that somewhere nearby a spectacular ice show was in progress, or a revival of
Porgy and Bess
in French, or one of those concerts for children, judiciously Negroed and Puerto Ricaned and Central Park Wested, narrated by this handsome symphony conductor who explained Wagner as though the Walkyries were a kind of baseball team in the American League. This aura had less to do with the building’s architecture, perhaps, than with its state of mind. I felt that above me, in all the offices, suites, executive dining rooms and marbled toilets bright as ballrooms, were men of our time doing the work of our time. It was as if the American Can Company’s vision of the world had finally won through, and that here, throughout this new, light, sleek-angled temple of new materials-through-chemistry, duty and profit mixed and were, at their highest level, one.