Boswell (49 page)

Harley thought about that awhile and I thought, It’s grand to swing, it is grand to be a swinger. If it were ever my fate to be executed for something, I would hope they would hang me. Fitting—a broken neck and a hard-on. What more could anybody get from life?

“I’m sorry, Boswell,” Harley said at last. “I’ll certainly take it under advisement, but I can’t hold out any more hope than that at this time.”

“Harley,” I said, “you leave me no alternative. I’m going to The Lace.”

“What’s The Lace? I don’t think I’ve ever heard of The Lace.”

“Now who’s being a snob, Harley?” I said, and hung up.

My conversation with Harley, like my conversation with the pawnbroker, made me feel marvelous. My year of relative retirement had changed me, made me stronger. I could put people off now. It was odd; taking them in and putting them off came finally to the same thing. There was freedom in it. I gazed happily at my shiny, unpressed pants, my windbreaker’s broken zipper. The abuses, I thought proudly, the abuses of adversity. So be it. Amen. If I could not do anything about death I could at least do something about something else, do something about men. Let me at them! I could con the fat cats of the world, the wizards and counselors and generals and poets, the people with power or ideas who lived, I saw, with a terrible unconsciousness, like sleek, expensive, ticking bombs. The progress of a hero worshiper was inexorable. The Italian cynic, Neal Admirari, was right. No man is a hero to anyone he’s been introduced to. I had lived my life as a kind of Irishman, in forests of imagination searching under mushrooms for elves and leprechauns. Now I was entitled to shout that that they didn’t exist. I had earned disbelief. Whee, I thought. Here comes Boswell!

I would have to see Nate, but first I went back to my room. So long as my plan was still unrealized I needed time to relish and contemplate each step. That night I didn’t go back to Margaret. I lay on the bed in my room and listened to a man shout at a woman down the hall. I heard him hit her; I heard her scream. I lay there testing my loneliness, feeling my singleness as one might cautiously put pressure on a sprained ankle. I needed to forget not that I knew Margaret and David and that I had lived with them, but that they had known and lived with me. I had to imagine myself forgotten, dead, someone who had lived seven hundred years before in a country that had kept no records. I had to imagine myself not born yet.

I waited two more days. I took my meals in the Automat during the busy hours and sat next to others who spooned their soup and chewed their sandwiches as if I were invisible. You’ve got to get used to it. You’re a long time dead.

On Thursday afternoon I went to Nate’s. When he saw me in my old clothes he broke into a broad smile. “Margaret’s left him,” he said to Perry. “Margaret’s left you,” he said.

“No,” I said. “Pick up my tabs, Nate.”

“Jimmy, you’re a rich man. What are you talking about?”

“Nate, it kills me. It stifles my creativity.” I told him about the room I had rented. He laughed.

“Pick up my tabs again, Nate.” I had discovered the secret of Nate’s indifference to me since I had married Margaret. Anyone who is around the successful too much develops a passion for the occasional failure. Now I was no longer of any use to him.

“It wouldn’t be the same thing, Jimmy. You don’t need it any more.”

“I need it.”

“Well, a cup of the arctic lichen,” he told Perry, “for Jimmy and me. For auld lang syne, Jimmy.”

Perry muttered something I couldn’t hear and signaled to a waiter standing by an enormous gilt samovar.

“Nate,” I said when Perry had poured our tea, “I’ve got a terrific proposition for you. What did I cost you in the old days? Five hundred, six hundred a year?”

Nate sipped his tea. I picked up my cup and drank from it quickly; it was as awful as I had remembered it.

“Some years a little more, maybe. But that’s a fair average, I’d say.”

“Okay,” I said. “Peanuts.”

“Wait a minute,” Nate said.

“Peanuts, Nate. I’ve got a bank account of my own now. Peanuts are peanuts. I have an idea, Nate, that could cost you twenty-five thousand dollars a year at the very least.”

“Hey, wait a minute,” Nate said.

“Nate, forgive me, you’re a fool.”

“Hey, wait a minute.”

“A fool,” I said. “Short-sighted. You do not see even the topmost E on the eye charts. That E is for eternity, Nate! Where will you spend eternity? Nate? Where will you spend eternity?”

“Hey, wait a minute.”

“What have you got here? A fancy clip-joint. Five forks and spoons in the Michelin Guide. Dorothy Kilgallen puts your name in the papers. The movie stars come after the world premieres. Signed pictures on the wall— Nate with Shirley Temple, Nate with Robert Mitchum, Nate with Jimmy Stewart.”

“Nate with Senator McCarthy,” Nate said. “Nate with John Foster Dulles.”

“Republicans, Nate, Republicans. Where will you spend
eternity?
It’s nothing. You’re living on borrowed time, do you know that? What do you think history will have to say? That Dag Hammarskjöld once had lunch here? That you turned out the only decent ground-reindeer-horn cakes in New York?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I am talking about history, Nate. I’m talking about history, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Do you
even
have sons? Do you even have
sons?
Who gets this place when you die? Perry? You won’t be cold six months when somebody’ll whisper in his ear: ‘Perry’s Place.’ Perry’s Place. It has a nice ring, he thinks; Nate’s dead, I’m alive, he thinks. Perry’s Place.
Perry’s Place.
Two weeks later your sign comes down and a new one goes up. PERRY’S PLACE. With, if you’re lucky, a footnote: ‘Formerly Nate’s.’
Formerly Nate’s!
What the hell kind of write-up is that? I’m talking about history. Do you think that as of today you’re history? Do you think it is even peeping at you as it scans Forty-seventh Street? Don’t kid yourself.”

“I don’t know what you want me to do,” Nate said.

“Nate, have you ever heard of the Algonquin Round Table?”

“Are you nuts? Sure I heard of it. Dorothy Parker, F. P. Adams, Woollcott—that crowd. Sure I heard of it.”

“It was nothing,”
I said. “Nothing. Journalists. They had a better press than you. It was in the family. But what I’m talking about is history.”

“History,” Nate said.

“A Club.”

“A club,” Nate said.

“The Club!
I could go to the Foundations with this thing, Nate. They’d back it in a minute. But what would happen? The Hilton Chain would do the catering. Pasty little sandwiches for the gullets of the great. It isn’t to be thought of. I owe it to you—you owe it to yourself. And if not to yourself, then what about Perry? What do you think history would do with someone like Perry? He’d be sensational. He’d be magnificent, the sullen little bastard. They’d call him ‘Perry.’ Just like that, his first name. Whole generations would come to know his picturesque, miserable ways. And if they’d do that for Perry, what wouldn’t they do for
you?
I’m giving you a chance to be respectable, Nate. The Algonquin Round Table was nothing compared to this. Think of it, Nate. Your place. Your place in history. Once a month, through your doors—” I pointed to the doors. “Through your doors would pour the cream of the scientific, political and intellectual worlds. That crowd. To sit at your tables.” I pointed to the tables. “I’m talking history to you, Nate.”

“You’re crazy.”

“They’d have to work the Presidential Inauguration around our schedule.”

“You’re nuts.”

“Stockholm would have to be advised of our meeting dates so as not to interfere with the Awards.”

“Insane.”

“The universities would have to agree to set some fixed date for their June graduation in order to get our speakers.”

“Have some more arctic lichen,” Nate said.

“Wars would be declared only on days we weren’t meeting. Once a month the world would go to bed secure, knowing the bombs couldn’t fall that night.”

“Perry, bring us an orchid salad.”

“The TV people would probably want to block off the street.”

“Perry, two whooping crane steaks. Rare.”

“We wouldn’t allow anyone to take pictures inside the place. Like Parliament. Like Congress.”

“Balinese wonder pudding, Perry.”

“We might have to set up a special table for the Secret Service men. Some of these babies can’t go anywhere without them.”

“And—and—and ice water!” Nate cried, ecstatic.

“The Russians would send spies.”

“It’s marvelous. Marvelous.”

“Once a year we’d pose for an official portrait. We might even authorize some candid shots of the members. Yes! They’d turn up years later in attics. Skira would collect them and publish them in a book.”

“Eat. Eat your orchid,” Nate said happily.

I stuffed a purple petal into my mouth. “Nate,” I said, “do you trust me? Let me work out the arrangements. I promise you a Club. I’ll get the biggest people, the biggest. The first meeting in two months. We’ll turn this place into a pantheon of the famous.”

“It’s marvelous, Jimmy,” Nate said. He was chewing the tough flowers fiercely. A bit of bluish bloom stuck to his chin.

“I’ve got to get started,” I told him and got up.

“But your dinner,” Nate said. “The whooping crane. The Balinese wonder pudding.”

“Later, Nate. There are too many things to do. The orchid salad was actually very filling.”

On the way out I brushed past Perry in his white dinner jacket with its subtle bulge. “Everything to your taste, sir?” he asked, grimly smiling.

“Excellent, Perry, excellent. My compliments to the gardener!”

V

Now it came to pass that in those days a call went out… Tee hee hee.

If you get a one per cent return on junk mail you’re doing well. Starting cold I couldn’t hope even for that. Was I Sears Roebuck announcing a January White Sale? I was a stranger inviting presidents and kings to my party.

The problems were staggering. In comparison a bride puzzling how to distribute thirty-five or fifty invitations among relatives and friends numbering in the hundreds had as little to do as a ranch cook ringing a bell to call hired hands to supper. There was a plethora of exceptional people in the world. In the old days you had a king, a half dozen nobles, a few ministers of state— maybe a handful of others, a poet laureate, perhaps, a court architect, a genius working in a basement. But today! A world where people could seek their own level worked against me. There were sixteen thousand, four hundred fifty-three people listed in the current
Who’s Who
—and that just took in America. Nate could accommodate two hundred. Which two hundred?

Ruthlessly I hacked away at those parts of my plan which I saw were impracticable. Although I originally hoped for The Club to be genuinely international in character, once I got down to it I realized that the problems of transportation and expense to foreign members were prohibitive. They might come once. (This raised the problem, too, of monthly meetings; it was too much. We could meet quarterly, perhaps.) So now I figured on only token foreign representation, ten places to revolve among important non-nationals. Admittedly this made The Club one-sided, like calling seven games between two American baseball teams a
World
Series, or naming the winner in a competition that never attracted entries from more than four countries the World Heavyweight Champion. But what could I do?

Next, how could I be sure that the most important people would, in combination, be good mixers? A minor point, of course—what counted was that they come, not that they enjoy themselves. Also, great men are not notably gregarious. I’d have to impress upon them the exclusivity of the project, the summit conferency tone of the thing.

The problems of organization were appalling. Like many obsessed men, however, I am like a scientist when it comes to working out the technical obstacles to my obsession. I classified and sub-classified like a biologist. I made experiments. Once I wrote down the names of a dozen men in a particular field and discovered from this single list an invaluable lesson: There are essentially two kinds of men, the practitioner and the theoretician, and although the theoretician is often the weightier in history’s scales, it is the practitioner to whom the glamour attaches. To strike a balance it was necessary that both classes be represented. Delicate proportions had to be established, for I saw that this problem was inextricably linked to the problem of the selection of categories. Who was to say that a zoölogist did not do more finally to change the world than a surgeon, or that a writer of popular songs didn’t have a greater effect than either?

Now I was involved in the very heart of my problem, for I was beginning to consider the issue of fame and power. Was I after something that was ultimately quantitative or qualitative? In whom was I actually interested, the guy on stage or the fellow in the wings? This was not an organizational so much as a metaphysical issue, and I saw I was dealing with nothing less than the old business of appearance and reality. What, I had to ask myself, were my aims? My character gave me the answer: I had none. In the final analysis I was involved in creating an effect, merely an effect. If I concerned myself with these issues it was only to the extent that they reflected on that effect. I saw myself again as someone without collective or contiguous purpose in the world—as someone, finally, without community or continuity. What I cared about, I discovered, was The Club, not the people who would be in it. Like any zealot I thought not in terms of ends, but at once and at last of the old ineluctable self.
That,
it turned out, was the principle of the thing. Hey, I thought, you’ve the makings of a leader yourself. The stuff of greatness is in you. With that established, all my finicky concern to strike a balance became irrelevant. I had unnecessarily confused myself. Now I saw that I had to be arbitrary, artistic rather than thorough, theatrical rather than scientific.

A gathering of zoölogists and lapidaries and musicologists was too tame; it was beside the point. I needed doers, not dons. One had to go, then, not where the power was, but where it seemed to be. So in the end I had to look no further than the newspapers or any other mirror of popular opinion. I threw away my
Who’s Who
and took up my
Time
—the categorical techniques of which nicely fitted my scheme, incidentally. By poring over the last two years’ back issues and collating the most frequently alluded to names I soon had a practical, workable list of potential members.