Boswell (32 page)

I gave in at once. I usually do, of course, but this time I gave in eagerly, turning over my will to the will of the place, the Anglo-Saxon genie god of Western Man who folded out, like a picture in
Life
magazine. If I had spoken just then my voice would have been low, reverential, like the voice not of the believer himself but of the visitor in an alien church who cannot keep the exaggerated respect out of his tone.

I examined the directory hastily.

There was a tremendous tier of elevators which looked like a solid wall of chrome, a huge, wide block of the stuff, in which, one day, some artist, some Western Man, would chisel the faces of the New Heroes and make of it a fresh Rushmore. Looking at the imposing set of elevators I had the feeling that somehow I would have to book passage, that there were low seasons and high, family plans and excursion tours, and perhaps, despite my feeling of being in a new and better democracy, different classes.

I went up to one of the starters. “The Complex is on what floor, please?”

He looked at me critically. “Which office?” he asked.

“Which office?” I repeated lamely. I stared gloomily at the emblem on his tunic, a highly edited map of the world with the shapes of all the European and Western Hemisphere countries.
“Western Civilization, Inc.,”
it read.

“Press, Radio, TV, the Magazine? Which department?”

“Oh,” I said. “Executive. Editorial.”

“Do you have an appointment?”

“Yes. Yes I do. I have an appointment.”

“With whom?”

“With—with the Chairman.”

“Gordon Rail?” He looked at my clothes doubtfully, the slacks-and-sportshirt and Toby Tylers in which I meet the world. I look not so much like Western as Bleacher Man.

“Look,” I said, “I’m an ex-dope fiend.”

“What?”

“A junkie. You know—pot, snow, horse, shit. They’re doing a story on me, man. How I had the courage to shake the monkey. You know.”

“Oh.”

“Mr. Rail thinks I’ll be an inspiration to all the other dope fiends. He’s doing the interview himself. You know.”

“Oh.”

“I’m getting five thousand bucks,” I said.

“Oh,” the starter said. He took my arm and led me to one of the elevators. “Thirty-eighth floor, Bill,” he said to the operator.

When the doors closed the world was shut out. Unfamiliar music purred. “Pretty,” I said to the operator.

“It’s on tape,” he said. “A special composition. Lasts exactly seventy-two seconds, exactly the time it takes to get up to the thirty-eighth floor. There’s a whole cycle of these compositions. They’re done by a very famous composer. That’s Stokowski conducting.”

“Is that right?” I said. “Pretty.”

“Sure,” he said. “There are two hundred different compositions. It would take hours of riding in the elevator to hear them all.”

“I suppose if one had the time it would be very worthwhile,” I said.

“Every elevator will have its own cycle one day, except for the lower floors maybe. You can see why it would be impractical for the lower floors.”

“Sure,” I said.

“Right now only thirty through sixty are installed with the service.”

“It’s terrific,” I said.

“Mr. Rail himself commissioned it. Oh, it’s very sound psychologically. You take most elevators. You get into the average elevator, you come on it’s the middle of a song and usually you’re out before it’s over. There’s a sense of incompleteness, of frustration. There’s something… you know… missing. It could upset you. You’d want to hear the whole tune; you’d worry about it unconsciously.”

“I know what you mean,” I said.

“In a creative place like this precious man-minutes could be lost.”

“Yes.”

“Tum-ta-ta-tum. Tum-tum-ta-ta-tum, tum-tum. Here we are. Thirty-eight. Right on time.”

“Remarkable,” I said.

The doors opened and for a moment I thought I had gone blind. After the brightness of the lobby and the elevator I was unprepared for the dimness that greeted me. I seemed to be in a large room of a deep, profound brown, amid deep, profound brown walls and a deep, profound brown ceiling. My feet sank four inches into deep, deep profound brown carpet. There was no furniture in the room, just deep, profound brown space.

The very bowels of Western Man, I thought, astonished.

After a few moments I became aware that I was not in an empty room. At one end of the place, at a distance of perhaps a little less than the length of a bowling alley, there was a deep, profound brown desk, uncluttered except for a single deep, profound brown telephone. Behind it was a girl, her face washed in a nimbus of sourceless light. I went toward her, moving through layers of soft, sourceless music.

When I was closer I saw that the girl was beautiful, the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. She had a face like Laura on a train that is passing through, and even before she spoke I knew what that voice would sound like. It would be a mature blend of Bronx and London drawing room, intelligent and sexy and comfortable and a little hoarse—the voice of a girl who had quit Vassar or Smith or Radcliffe in her sophomore year, and had slept around and drunk gin neat and toured Europe on a motorcycle and been in air raids and spent evenings of the revolution in sleeping bags on mountaintops with a guerilla leader who had lost an arm. She’d had poems published and once been in love with a bald, fat, sensitive little man who sold insurance door to door in Omaha, Nebraska. She had gone there to have her baby which the beaten-down brain surgeon, later a suicide in Vera Cruz, had given her. She was neurotic and sick and a black-belt judo champion who could play the guitar and the recorder and sing songs in strange, unremembered languages like Babylonian, Urdu, and Red Chinese. She had sat turning tricks in the windows of Amsterdam and been a Gray Lady in a Chicago hospital. She had been stranded during the war once in a low café in Saigon where she sat beneath a chuffing palmetto fan dealing cards to a Japanese general, all the time collecting information which would later be of use to the Allies. A beat Beatrice, she had been the lost love and inspiration of poets and philosophers and kings and to more than a few men of good will who’d had nothing before she met them but their despair. She was four hundred and thirty-seven years old but she looked twenty-six.

We looked at each other and I smiled from across years, in love, inviting her to love me, inviting her to let me screw her right there on the deep, profound brown carpet. She would have let me, I know, if only the light had been better and she could have seen my eyes and realized who and what I was. (That is no argument, of course. They
all
would.)

Instead, she smiled back and said, “Yes?” It was code if ever I heard code. I understood. It was the most gracious, the wittiest thing any woman had ever said to me.

“Mr. Rail,” I said right back to her. She knew what I meant.

“What is your name, please?” she asked.

“It’s James Boswell. I am James Boswell,” I said, getting several dozen levels of meaning into the remark.

She said something I couldn’t hear, but I knew that it was my name and that she was communicating somehow with inner offices, with upper echelons, that even now the name was being spoken into machines, that cards gave it back unrecognized, professing ignorance.

In a few seconds she turned her head slightly as if in a listening position. “I’m sorry, Mr. Boswell,” she said, “you don’t seem to be on the appointment schedule.”

“I’m not.”

“Mr. Rail won’t see you,” she said sympathetically. It was a kind of warning. It was enough for me that she understood.

“Come away with me,” I said suddenly.

“I can’t do that, Mr. Boswell,” she said.

“Please,” I said. “Say my name. Say ‘Jim.’”

“I can’t do that,” she said.

“Who are you kidding?” I said roughly. I indicated the deep, profound brown space around us. “This isn’t Western Civilization,” I said.

“It’s what we have instead of Western Civilization,” she said. “You know that.”

“Of course.” I gazed intensely at her. “One day I’ll be back,” I said. “One day I’ll have an appointment and be back. Perhaps then.”

“Good luck,” she said. “Good luck… Jim.”

“Yes.”

“Goodbye, Jim.”

In the elevator, going down, I listened carefully to the seventy-two-second symphony. As long as either of us lived, I knew it would be our song.

May 12, 1955. Los Angeles.

That scheme I had for suing celebrities and settling out of court was pretty harebrained. It’s different for a girl. If worse comes to worse a girl can always throw a paternity suit at a movie star, but what chance do I have? And unfortunately I’m too damn big for anybody to beat up in a night club. Suing for plagiarism might get me into the offices of one or two network presidents, but there’s no future in that. Too costly. Too risky. Besides, I of all people mustn’t start screwing around with the law.

I’ve been doing all right, I suppose, but it’s slow, it’s slow. I meet these guys one by one and only after fairly arduous campaigns. It’s like doing piecework. One-fell- swoopism, that’s
my
philosophy. Some sort of club is the only way, I know, but who’s in a position? Of course I might always be able to
marry
contact the way others marry money—but then I’d have to share. These goddamned community property laws are a menace.

March 11, 1956. St. Louis.

Something has happened. My uncle Myles was buried this afternoon. Launched in his wooden box, he seemed more like some object on loan from a museum than a human being. He is low in the earth now.

I was struck, at the funeral, by how lone a figure my Uncle Myles was. There were mourners—more, I suppose, than I might have expected—but I didn’t recognize many of them. It seems unlikely that this is simply a consequence of our estrangement. He had been an obscure Mason and the Masons buried him and some of them came to see the job they had done. And I recognized his doctor, a man whose presence at his patient’s funeral apparently did not strike him as in the least ironic. He was as professional as ever; this might have been simply another call. Certainly, when he took me aside at the chapel, cautious to steer me wide of the trestle on which my uncle’s coffin lay, to tell me that my uncle had been a gravely—that was his word—ill man for whom medicine could do nothing, it might have been only another diagnostic conference beyond the patient’s bedroom. I remembered these from the time when I still lived with my uncle, and I experienced again the same peculiar mixture of boredom and conspiracy. Oddly, my knowledge of my uncle’s death was simply an extension of my knowledge of his illness. That he could not know of his own death seemed to deepen it somehow, as his naïveté about his sickness when he lived had made that more profound.

I was impatient with the doctor’s insistence on giving me the details, though I understood that it was simply the logical consequence of his function, as though his job was finally advisory, admonitory, his position that of a man who explained death rather than of one who could cure it or hold it off.

The others at the funeral were, I supposed, fellow lawyers and one or two of my uncle’s strange, pathetic clients. Perhaps some were the few mysterious friends he would visit sometimes in the evening. (I remembered, guiltily, how glad I had been to come home and find my uncle gone.) They were the raggle-taggle crew even the loneliest of us can claim, irrelevant to our existences but solidly there in our lives despite that. (I think of all the hotel clerks whose faces are familiar to me, of all the elevator operators.) They were the supernumeraries with whom finally we spend more time than with those we dream of, as though the landscape of our lives has always to be filled with people, crowds, masses, populations, the tradesman who brings the bread, perhaps, the man who waits with us each day at the bus stop, those yeasty populations of the unknown, there by accident, to whom we talk and talk and talk. They are legion. How many words, I wonder, can have passed between us? How many gestures of affection or civility?

Someone said my name. My uncle’s minister was beside me. “When I’ve prayed, Jim, I’d like you to speak.”

“I couldn’t. What could I say?”

“You’re his only survivor,” the minister said. “Just offer a few words for the repose of his spirit.”

“Wait. I wouldn’t know what to say.”

But the minister had already gone up to the side of the grave and opened his Bible. I barely heard his prayers; my mind was full of the things I might say. Though they all seemed hypocritical, there was something pleasant, even thrilling, in the idea of speaking there. It was like being a guest of honor, or the best witch at a birthday party. Nevertheless, I didn’t know what I could say about my uncle, and I looked down before the minister could catch my eye.

“I’ve asked Myles’ nephew, Mr. James Boswell, to address his thoughts to this sad occasion,” the minister said finally.

Someone touched my arm and I moved up beside the grave. “I’ve been asked to speak,” I said. “I didn’t know this was a custom. I’m unprepared.” I felt silly. Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking, I thought giddily.

They watched me. No one there, including myself, had loved my uncle; I knew this as if it had been a fact of nature. And we had been as supernumerary to him as he had been to us. It came to me that the major relationship between people was a kind of reciprocal indifference. It was comforting. I realized that no one ever had much to lose. Strangely moved, I began to speak.

“My uncle and I didn’t understand each other,” I said. “He’d be surprised to know that I am delivering his eulogy. We always postponed as long as we could answering each other’s letters.”

They looked at me stonily, but having that audience gave me a strange confidence. I might have been addressing a ship’s company, or men before battle. I had a sense of heightened opportunity; it was now only a question of finding out what I needed to say.

“Well, what can I say about him?” I asked seriously. “He had very few friends,” I began. “Truthfully, I don’t think I recognize more than two or three of you., You couldn’t have been close to him—I wasn’t close to him myself. Yet he’s dead and we must all have felt something because we’re all here to watch his funeral. Well,
I
feel something.
I
do. Jesus, I really feel something right now.