Boswell (53 page)

Dr. Mefwiss told me that examinations in the home were by their very nature superficial and that if the pains did not go away then by all means I must come in for additional tests, but that in the meanwhile he didn’t think there was much to worry about, that I seemed to him somewhat tired and that these symptoms might very well be my body’s way of warning me that it was time to slow down. Here was an opportunity to get some rest, he said, and that if I thought it would help he could leave me some prescriptions for that purpose—tranquilizers, a mild sleeping pill, something for my pain.

“Leave them with the doorman,” I said.

“Yes,” Dr. Mefwiss said. He snapped his case shut and stood up.

“I threw up,” I told him hopefully.

Dr. Mefwiss shrugged.

“Well, thank you very much, Doctor. You can let yourself out, I think, and please don’t forget to return that passkey to the desk.”

When he left I picked up the telephone. “Roger? Jim.”

“Yes, Jim,” Roger said. “How did it go?”

“Ήe doesn’t think I ought to be moved at this time, so he’s not hospitalizing me just now, Roger. He’ll give you some prescriptions for me, I’d like you get them filled right away.”

“Yes, of course,” Roger said worriedly.

“What about the rent?” I asked.

Roger hesitated.

“Come on, what happened?”

“She didn’t pay it, Jim.”

“Ah.”

“Maybe she just forgot.”

“Mind like a trap, Roger. Seven languages. Photographic memory.”

“Well, it’s only two days late. The office didn’t think anything of it.”

“The doctor said I had to rest,” I said wearily. “It’s tiring me to talk.”

“I understand,” Roger said.

“Get the prescriptions filled,” I said. I replaced the phone and then called him back immediately.

“Roger? There’s something else. That doctor… I don’t know. Ask around; something may be fishy. See what you can find out. I don’t have to tell you to be discreet.” I hung up.

Lying there, I had the sense that something which I had not wanted to happen was already beginning. At last I knew what it was. At any time during the past fifteen years someone could have asked me, “What’s troubling you, Boswell?” and I could have answered, “The three- hundred-pound bench press,” “John Sallow,” “A contact in New York,” “The Great,” “The Club,” “Death.” My life had been without real complexity. It had had the classic simplicity of an obstacle course, the routine excitement of anticipated emergencies. I had lived peculiarly untouched by what men call fate, and if I had sometimes missed complexity I had usually been able to see it as a proliferation of passions, something I was unqualified for. If I had ever regarded myself sentimentally, it was as a kind of hero
manqué.
No one could long grieve for what one was unsuited for by condition and will. No one could cry over unpoured milk. I lived untouched by fate still, but the other thing—complexity—was being gradually forced upon me, and only now was it clear that what I called “complexity” was not so much a proliferation of passions as a diminishment of them, a chipping away at whatever passion one could call his own. It was indeed a heart attack I had suffered, no matter what the doctor said. Real life, if not knowing where one stood
were
real life, was simply a question of subterranean manipulations, of contrivings, a robbing of Peter to pay Paul. The great thing was to be obsessed, to maintain one’s certainty, to be able to know arrogantly.

Something had gone wrong. Still, I knew that if I had been betrayed it had been by my own hand; the doctor had as much as told me so. If the symptoms I felt, the disturbances of my peace like the violences of terrorists, were psychosomatic, as the doctor had more than hinted, then it could only mean that I had mislived my life, that all the time I had thought I was doing otherwise I had been working overtly against my own silent nature. At my age this was unthinkable; that only now my nature, whatever oriental a thing it might turn out to be, was taking its revenge, was outrageous. It was like being damned without warning, like being condemned to Hell because one was an ignorant pagan. Why didn’t you tell me, I felt like demanding of my nature. Why were you so silent, so demurring all these years? Evading with no comment and sometimes even with approval all those things you privately condemned? You were my God, I thought, I had no other. Why didn’t you love me?

Now it was simply too late; I would not reform. This
was
the record for a heart attack and there was no cure. I would have to sing the tune the way I had learned it. If one of us had to give in, it would have to be my nature, my self-righteously taciturn and conspiratorial true self. Had ever a true self been less true?

If I had no genuine disease now, why, one day I would. One day I could bring the doctors a real cancer, a recognizably diseased heart. I warned my pain that I could live with it, my nature that although I would never understand its treachery, I could live with it as well. My pain had confused me, but now that I knew the awful thing it stood for I could resist it. In three days, I told myself, I would be better. I closed my eyes and slept better than I had in days.

The phone rang. “It’s Roger. Did you get the medicine? I let myself in and put it by your bed. You were sleeping.”

“Yes, Roger. I see it. Thank you.”

“You know,” he said, “you were right.”

“Was I?” I asked sleepily.

“You certainly were. I can’t say very much about it now, but it looks as though you were right about him.”

“Was I? About whom?”

“That doctor—Mefwiss. I asked the doorman at Number 36. Mefwiss used to have his office there. He’s mixed up in some stuff. There’s talk of a malpractice suit over his head in another state.”

“Fixing beyond fixing.”

“He sure fooled me,” Roger said. “All his talk about a virus going round, cigarettes and cancer, men with heart conditions leading normal lives—just a front.”

“Fixing beyond fixing.”

“You really spotted that guy.”

“Fixing beyond fixing. Thank you, Roger.”

I leaned back. The pains in my chest were just as severe as ever, but I was untroubled. Roger had helped me. Another doorman in my life, I thought, another gatekeeper. There was something Elizabethan about it. The old democracy between king and fool. But I knew pleasantly that if I were inside the walls now it was in body only—not spirit, thank you. There was still something in myself reprobate and unreconstructed. If it was not, as I had just learned, my soul, then it was something better than my soul—my will perhaps, the glands of my need. Fixing beyond fixing, even within myself. Here I was in civil but civilized war with my own nature, the two factions outwardly like gentlemen who still behaved courteously toward one another, but deeper and more importantly, wheelers and dealers who cynically kept the trade routes open.

Later I called Roger and asked him to bring the newspapers.

“Which ones?”

“What difference does it make? Fixing beyond fixing, eh, Roger? Scratch a hero and what have you got left?”

“Nothing,” Roger said.

“Right. Men are hollow. It’s easier to keep the trade routes open that way.”

“You can’t trust anybody,” Roger said.

“The truth shall make you free,” I said.

“So long as it doesn’t make too free with you, eh, Jim?”

“Jackanapes!” I roared when I replaced the phone. “Man in motley! Clown!”

I wondered where Margaret was.

Toward evening the telephone in our room rang (to make David feel more at home we had given him his own telephone) and I got out of bed to answer it. It could have been Margaret. People rarely called us; mostly we used the phone to call each other. When I picked up the receiver the person on the other end of the line listened to my voice without answering. “Margaret?” I said. “Is that you? I’m a sick man, Margaret. What have you been doing with yourself, kid?” I hung up.

Back in David’s room it occurred to me to call my son. I dialed the Fifth Avenue salon where David worked. “May I speak with Mr. David, please?”

“Who is this, please?”

I experimented. “A friend. He’ll know.”

“Mr. David is
very
busy.

“Bitch,”
I said.

“Look, if this is the party that’s been bothering him, he’s asked me to tell you that he’s very upset and that you’re not to call any more.”

“Get him. It’s his father. Get him,” I shouted

David came to the phone. I could imagine its being thrust into his hand and him taking it as though it were a microphone into which he was expected to sing while people fled a burning theater. He would be turning his head now, looking around him with that special, sly confusion he affected. “Yes?” he said uncertainly.

“David, it’s Papa.”

“Oh,” David said. “Oh. How are you?”

“Why do you spite me, David?”

“Is something wrong? I’m sorry, is something wrong?”

“Forget about it, David. Cut your losses and try to live. Where are you?”

“I’m working.”

“Where are you? I’m home for a few days. I haven’t seen you.”

“Oh,” David said. I knew what he was going to say next and when he actually said it there was nothing more I could do for him. “You were gone so much,” David said, “I thought it might be because of me. I didn’t want to put you to any trouble. That’s why I left.” Then he added, “I’m in the Village—with a friend.”

“Look, Telemachus, you’ll never catch me. Give it up. Do something you’re good at. I didn’t know it was going to be you when I screwed your mother. Forget about it. Look at it this way, what happens when I die? You’ll just be left holding your lousy bag of spite.”

David didn’t answer. I sighed. “Where’s Margaret?” I asked finally.

“Isn’t she with you?” he asked happily.

“You’re a rotten kid, sonny. I disinherit you for the second and last time. Goodbye.”

That was the way to do it, I thought. The cutting of one’s losses was an art form. I had never allowed David to drain much of my spirit, but it was useless to pretend he hadn’t gotten something. He wasn’t entitled to it, but what he got away with he got away with. Already I felt a little stronger.

I called Roger and asked him to pick up some things for me in the room on Fifty-eighth Street. I had been neglecting The Club. The strength I had won back from David I would put into the arrangements that had still to be made.

Now that was the way to live, I thought. Simply. Why, the world was a Walden if you knew how to look at it. Madness and method were the strengths of the true champion. For the first time in many days I forced myself to think of the great. For the first time in my life I allowed myself to say “we.”

VIII

April 30, 1962. New York City.

I dreamt of The Club.

I had a new symptom: I could see only in lurid shades of red. It was not unpleasant, and I strolled about the room almost merrily, making sure that everyone was happy and had what he wanted. I had never been so content. I had the comfortable sense that all time was before us, that it had been frozen forever at Saturday night.

I was the Host. “Oh, Boswell can be the Host,” people called when I walked in, and the Queen ran up and slipped the mantle of Host around my neck. “The amiable man,” she said.

“I am not genuinely fond of people,” I replied modestly and they all applauded. “As you were,” I said, and they returned to their conversations.

I continued my tour of the room, the merry old uncle of Scrooge’s early Christmases, long hose over my plump, pinkish, hairless calves, fat as jolly roasts. They had dressed me in silks, and I walked among them wide- behinded, hearty as a father of the bride, moving people under the mistletoe, proposing toasts, drinking all men’s healths, shoving money into the fiddler’s hands. People smiled at me and begged me to stay, but I remembered my obligations and shook my head. Frequently I wrote out checks and folded them into their parting handshakes.

Nate’s was as lush as a tropic. Now that I was an intimate of the place, it struck me as it never had when I was an outsider. My dancing slippers glided silkenly over the soft fur carpets. The linen, thick as blankets on the tables, looked like the cloths that set off precious stones in jeweler’s trays; indeed, I could just perceive the repressed gleam of gold and silver beneath the rosy haze of the cutlery. The knives and forks and goblets and dishes seemed expensive precision tools, like the studded, complicated brass of band instruments.

As I walked about the room, nodding happily to the lovely women, the handsome men, sound as athletes in their evening dress, I had a vision. Through the windows of Nate’s Place, past the crowds outside, I could see the Times Building, and moving across the dream-restored electric-bulbed banner in letters of fire: SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST. Of course, I thought. It was good to know. I remembered films I had seen where the end of the world was portrayed. The Bomb had fallen and the survivors were always a cross section, a tiny representative handful of men, cozy as people in an elevator together—a laborer, a businessman, a young officer, an old lady, a Negro, an ingénue, a bum. But it wouldn’t be like that at all—it would be like this. The last men and women on earth would be in evening clothes, as we were. We were vulnerable, perhaps, but we were less vulnerable. I began to congratulate the people around me as I greeted them, to love them for their safety. We were like finalists in some cosmic beauty contest—mutually gorgeous.

I felt a new elation, a new freedom, and I moved now with that special, just controlled wildness of the exceptionally happy. I became more interested in what people were saying, realizing just in time that it would be important. I didn’t want to miss any of it, but I saw that I couldn’t be everywhere at once. Had it not seemed ungracious I would have demanded the silence of all groups until I could join them. Things were being said, I knew, that I was missing—intimate shop talk of the Great, as sweet to me as the songs and voices of the Sirens. Two hundred was too unwieldy a number, I realized, and I had a sense of imperfection like the awareness of a stain on my trousers. It was no longer enough simply to live forever. It was no longer enough to be just one single man. I wanted to be everyone in this room and all the people in the crowds outside and all people everywhere who had ever lived. What did it mean to be just Boswell, to have only Boswell’s experience?