Boswell (4 page)

Often I have come to the gym alone at night (I have a key, and though there is no heat the exercise soon warms me). Sometimes I have been startled to come upon Singleman, the gymnast. He comes alone too and sets up his bar and makes giant circles in the dim light of the caged ceiling bulb. (Everything in the gym is caged, barred, protected from our raw force. It is the architect’s detail, the mind’s contempt for the body.) It is something, to be there straining at the weights and hear Singleman whirling behind me, to hear the snap-whrr-snap as he soars, falls, soars in the dark. It isn’t all camaraderie. On a deeper level we are self-absorbed. Like the monks. It’s a question, finally, of our own soul, our own body. We dry ourselves with the intense absorption of men cleaning weapons. We rub each part with a selfish vigor, reach up inside our bodies with the towels. We toss them without seeing into the big canvas hamper.

There is a bulletin board near the mirror where we comb our hair. (Like any athletes we try to hide our bodies when we are in the streets. We hide them inside ordinary clothes, beneath carefully combed hair.) A poster admonishes us to drink more milk, to beware of sunburn. Tacked to the board is a clipping from the sports page which tells of the training habits of Bob Wormer, the Olympic decathlonist. “Every morning Big Bob runs up Mile High Mountain near Lago, Colorado, where he lives. ‘Believe me, I’m not starting from sea level either. They call it Mile High Mountain because it sticks up a mile higher than any of the mountains surrounding it. I figure I must be pretty near ten thousand feet up when I get to the top,’ Bob claims. He’s done it, when he’s felt he’s needed the additional challenge, with a knapsack filled with rocks on his back. “There’s no telling what the body can do if it’s pushed,’ Big Bob says. Well, that may be, but it is this reporter’s guess that there aren’t many men around who would be willing to push Big Bob’s body.” I read the clipping to cheer me up. I am feeling down. Believe me, I haven’t started from sea level either.

It had been occurring to me all day that nothing had happened, that everything was the same as it was when Herlitz had spoken to me. Only I am stronger, bigger. Tonight my uncle will challenge me again and I will be tempted to leave him. He will hold me to the smallest promises, remind me of things casually said. My uncle loves me. This is a new thing in my life. But he is only an uncle, and he is sick. I have been thinking lately that my life is off-center. In all this world I am closest to an uncle.
I
am father to a child I have seen only once. I am a kind of widower at twenty. Every few years I am freshly made an orphan. My friends are the men in this gym, off-center themselves.

Baby Joe watches us dress with his fevered, jealous eyes. Malley. Peterson. Levine. Singleman. Flambeau. Marty Penner. Lyman Necchi. Perry Lacey, the runner, sings a bawdy song in the shower, ever cheerful, ever big-lunged. I see him in the mirror as he steps out. He is smiling and I wonder if he has just jerked off. He likes to do it in the shower, he says, because then the water washes the scum down the drain. Perry is very neat. This is true. There is no scum on his shorts, no hair on his comb, no lint in his pockets. Perry is pristine. A pristine horse’s ass. He comes out of the shower and claps his hands and Baby Joe tosses him a towel. He pats himself all over his body with it as though he were applauding. He shakes his head like a dog and water spritzes onto Flambeau’s white duck trousers. (Only Flambeau dresses like an athlete. In street clothes, he looks as though he were on his way to the tennis courts.) Lacey shakes his head again; more water comes off his hair.

“Come on, Lacey, you’re doing that on purpose,” Flambeau says.

“Kiss mine,” Lacey answers neatly. He takes his towel by two corners and twirls it around rapidly. It is now a terry-cloth whip and Perry is Lonesome Lacey, the Nude Cowboy. Before I know what is happening he has come up behind me and flicked my ass murderously with his towel.

“Take that, and that, and that,” he says.

“Lacey, go run some laps.”

He squares himself off to face me, bouncing up and down alertly on his legs. The springs, he calls them. The springs. He hits me with the towel again. I try to move aside, but Lacey is a fast man.

“Lacey, I’m going to hit you with a bar bell.”

“Pals,” he says and extends his hand.

I take it and crush it a little, which makes Lacey sore. He flings his towel down and comes toward me, but Lyman Necchi hips him aside. “Lacey, go get dressed. Jimmy would kill you.”

Lacey is reasonable. He knows it’s true. “You guys make me sick,” he says. He says it cheerfully and I am convinced it is his big lungs. “I mean it. You make me absolutely sick. You think all a runner is is fast. You don’t think a runner’s strong.” When he goes to bars Lacey talks about good little men. “Well, a runner’s very strong. He’s got endurance as well as speed. Endurance counts. Persistence pays.”

I go back to my locker and start getting dressed.

“Big. Big. That’s all you know. It makes me sore. It really does. I mean, for Christ’s sake, they’ve got laws, official laws about a boxer’s hands. Did you know that? It’s actually illegal for a boxer to hit somebody with his hands. They’re ’lethal instruments’ in the eyes of the law. Weapons. It’s as if he took a gun and shot you.”

“So?” Malley asks.

“So? So what’s so special about a boxer? Why just a boxer? The public don’t know nothing. Do you mean to tell me you don’t think a runner’s springs ain’t just as lethal?”

“Or his breath?” I say, thinking of Lacey’s lungs.

“Wise guy,” Lacey says with cheery contempt.

“A golfer’s club, that’s lethal too. That’s a weapon,” Flambeau says.

“A forward’s set shot,” Levine contributes.

“A wrestler’s sweat suit,” Malley says.

“A jockey’s horse,” says Peterson.

“Kiss mine,” Lacey says.

“Oh, come on, Lacey,” Lyman Necchi says. “Do you think that if a golfer clubbed somebody with his number nine iron he wouldn’t be arrested? Is that what you think? What’s the matter with you?”

“That’s not the point. It specifically mentions a boxer’s hands in the law books, and it don’t say nothing about a golfer’s number nine iron.”

“Lacey’s right,” Flambeau says.

“‘Lacey’s right, Lacey’s right,’” Marty Penner mimics. Penner is my friend—at least I think he would be if we ever saw each other outside the gym. He lifts weights, too, but he has contempt for it. He does it, he has told me, because, like me, he is afraid of death. He feels he must keep in shape. But he does not come to the gym every day; he is not really a regular. Often he watches me as I press the bar bells. I know he hears me as I pull at the weights and murmur the little incantation which helps me to raise them: “Because my heart is pure. Because my heart is pure.”

The others finish dressing and one by one drift off to their homes, their bowling alleys, their pool parlors. But I move slowly. I remain behind lacing my shoes, and Penner paces his dressing to match mine.

Lacey works on a spit curl in front of the mirror and then turns to us. “See you guys tomorrow,” he says.

“Good night, Lacey.”

Lacey nods to me and walks off.

“Hey, Lacey,” Penner calls.

Lacey turns and looks back down the row of lockers. “Yeah?”

“You’re a prick. Good night.”

Lacey waves.

Penner sits down. “Have you heard anything about a job?” he asks.

“No.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. It’s winter. I guess all the action is down in Sarasota at the winter quarters.”

“You going down?”

“I don’t think so. I’d feel like a jerk. How do you apply to be a strong man? What do you do? A routine? I can just see some guy watching me in a tent someplace while I audition. ‘Yeah, kid. You’re strong but you ain’t
powerful,
you know what I mean?’ It’s nutty. Who needs it?”

Penner smiled.

“The Great Sandusky is in town,” I said.

“Sure,” Penner said “Call
him.”

I shrugged. “I guess.”

Penner buttoned the big walnut buttons on his car coat. “Let me know what happens,” he said and went out.

“Sure,” I said. I gave a final tug at my lace and it broke. (I am always breaking my shoelaces.) I took a lace from one of my gym shoes and put it in the street shoe. When I got up to go I turned to Baby Joe, who was locking up his towel cage. “Hey, Baby Joe,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“How long do you think that cage would last if a big strong guy like me went to work on it?”

“You horse, I’ll know who done it,” he called after me.

I don’t mean to give a false impression. There are men who in the presence of madness become polite, sedate. Men who hear old ladies out, who listen to their fixed and mad ideas—sunspots, Hitler living on some Brazilian beach, the end of the world—and stand back, uncommitted but very polite. Of course you know where their hearts are and what they think of those old girls. The politeness is just aloof contempt. Not with me. I am listening. My mind is open, my contempt is not aloof. If it turns out that she is mad after all, I may not argue her out of it. There is too little time and too many old ladies. With me it’s a question of conservation, of human economy. There will be other old ladies I have to answer. In a girl’s arms and the girl has pimples and her breath is foul and the room is hot and the sheets are sticky and I’m tired anyway and the girl looks up and asks, “Jimmy, do you love me?”, I would not just say “Yes” or “Sure thing,” or, prizing my crummy little integrity, tell her “No” and list the reasons. I would make a pitch. And that’s
my
crummy little integrity, my Boswellness. What I mean is, I horse around when I have the chance. For an idolator I am no respector of persons save my own.

Uncle Myles was a bachelor and a lawyer and a Mason and a delegate to the Republican Convention and a deacon in the church and an honorary member of the Fire Department and a Friend of the Museum. He had charge accounts in all the department stores in our city and one in Weber and Heilbroner in New York and in Marshall Field in Chicago and Neiman-Marcus in Dallas and I. Magnin in San Francisco and Kauffman’s in Pittsburgh. Were he alive today he would carry in his wallet credit cards from all the major oil companies. It goes without saying that he would be a member of the Diner’s Club and Carte Blanche and all the rest. What he did not have was a season ticket to the ballpark and a subscribed box at the symphony and a book-club membership. He did not have them because they cost money, and my uncle did not have that either. He held the charge accounts because his credit was so good, and his credit was good because he never bought anything. He would have liked to—and that helped me to love him. Really, my uncle was not so different from myself. With me it was men; with him it was institutions. So I guess in an odd, collective way that made him a men man too.

As I have said, my uncle was a lawyer. A defending and defending attorney. He never made very much from it, though. Not that he defended lecherous old Negroes in Mississippi for winking at some passing white lady, or spun stately theories to night-school classes. No, he did not do very well because he was convulsive and trembled before the jury at the wrong time, and because he was a sort of civil-rights lawyer in reverse. He took the side of the Establishment in all things; indeed, he took the side of all Establishments. The Establishment rarely needs legal defending, and when it does it has the services of lawyers who do not shake. So my uncle, who was a regular himself, and an honorary member of the Fire Department and a Friend of the Museum, was left with the irregulars—defending, as it were, lecherous whites who winked at passing Negresses.

But my uncle was no fool. His arguments were better than mine, and I was afraid of them. I had lied to Marty Penner: I hadn’t gone to Sarasota because I couldn’t make up my mind to leave my uncle. Actually, I had become so accustomed to my guardians dying out from under me that I wasn’t prepared to do the leaving myself.

I went home on the bus. From the street I could tell that the apartment was dark, and I was grateful. My uncle sometimes went out alone at night. He had friends, I suppose. Everyone does. When I entered the apartment the house was quiet, and again I was relieved. I notice I frequently feel relief when people I am supposed to love leave me to myself. Bonner is right. Such a weight is the burden of love that the human being, even a strong man like myself, must put it down every so often. Women do not understand this; they are hurt when you hint it, and I suppose it is because they do not love as much or as strenuously as we do.

I went into my room and lay down. I had exercised heavily that day and I was tired. I was almost asleep when I heard a noise coming from my uncle’s room. It sounded like someone making violent love. The bed- springs were squawking in a steady passion. Could my uncle have a woman in his room? The idea saddened me, as other people’s lovemaking always does. When after about ten minutes the sounds still hadn’t stopped, I began to worry; I was certain it was a woman and that my uncle was humiliating himself on her. Then, of course, I realized how stupid I was. He was sick. I got out of bed and raced into his room. I snapped on the light.

My uncle was in bed alone, his body convulsed, his arms flung behind him on the headboard. He had smashed his watch crystal, and there was blood on his wrist. His left leg, arched, banged against his groin. Dreadfully, he had an erection. I leaned over his face.

“Can I help you? Uncle Myles. Can I help you?”

Below me my uncle’s body whipped and snapped. He might have been a dancer.

“Can I help you?”

“Sure,” he said. “Sing something.”

What did he want from me? What did he think a human being was, anyway?

“Come on, strong man,” my uncle said. “Pull my arms down.” Inside that turbulent body, his voice was steady, almost calm. “Hurry, hurry before my bones break.”

I reached out for his wrist, but was helpless to hold it. I tried again, and it twisted crazily out of my grip. “Both hands, Samson. Both hands.”

I took my uncle’s wrist in both my hands and pulled it toward the bed. The other hand, still free, punched the side of my head, but I wrestled his right arm down and kneeled on it. It continued to jerk, but finally my weight was too great for even those powerful convulsions. Then I tried to take his other arm, but it moved wildly away from me. Even after I managed to trap it I could not pull it down—I had no leverage. I had to straddle my uncle’s chest. Careful not to lose the arm I had already imprisoned, I pressed down on it with my knee. Then I reached toward his bleeding left wrist. It spun away from me, and for a moment I thought my uncle might be controlling it.
(“There’s no telling what the body can do if it’s pushed”
—Big Bob.) I took the arm at last and pulled at it as one pulls at an oar to turn a boat. The arm rattled and jerked, at one time taut and resisting, at another suddenly relaxed, pulling me off balance. Finally I mounted it with my knee as I had the other. I was now straddling my uncle’s chest, my knees dug into the hollow where the elbow bends. His face was white, wet. I looked down at him and he avoided my eyes. “The leg,” he said into the sheet. “Please, the leg.” His leg, out of control behind me, was like something loose.