Boswell (25 page)

I had never seen Nate so nervous. He was everywhere, directing everything. Once I saw him begin to fumble with the fastidious Perry’s bow tie, only to abandon it in frustration when he realized it was already correct. To the cook he was unforgivably rude, reducing that man almost to tears and then rushing back five minutes later to offer what was transparently an insincere apology because he was afraid the cook might take it in his head to attempt some damaging revenge. He scolded the waiters for imagined offenses, and even quarreled with the Puerto Rican busboys because he felt they were making too much noise with the silver. After a while, to calm him, I suggested we have a drink together.

“What drink?” he demanded angrily. “Harold Flesh comes to the place in an hour and he tells me to get drunk.”

“I’m not telling you to get drunk. I’m telling you to calm down.”

“Mind your business,” he said. “I’ll throw you the hell out of here. Perry’s right about you.”

“Perry’s a prick,” I said. “Why are you so concerned. about Harold Flesh? What can he do to you?”

“What, you think I’m legal? You think I’m Snow White? Jerk, you been away somewhere? You never heard the word
syndicate?
The term
Mafia
is unfamiliar to you?”

“Nate, you’re raving. You’re a nice man with a very expensive restaurant.”

He turned on me, genuinely angry. Before, the first time I had seen him, when I had welched on the bill—that was play. This was real. “What’s the matter, don’t you live in the same world I do?” he said. “Are you from Mars? That’s it, ain’t it, you’re from Mars. From never- never land, and you don’t know the way we do things here. You make me sick, do you understand me? You make me absolutely sick.”

“Nate, what did I do?”

“You make me sick. You do. You got no right, you got absolutely no
right
to be as big as you are and that stupid. I let you come here. You been to my parties, you meet my friends. You’re a big boy, God bless you, you got an appetite like a horse. I feed you bird tongues would cost a king his fortune to eat them and you don’t know a god-damn thing about me. Who I am, where I come from, how I got this place.”

“You never told me.”

“You never asked.”

“Well, I’m asking. Tell me.”

“I’ll write you a letter.”

“Tell me.”

“I’ll draw you a picture.”

“Tell me.”

“What’ll I tell you? Perry carries a gun? Okay—Perry carries a gun. So does Simmons, did you know that?
Simmons
carries a gun.”

“In the Mews?”

“Yes, in the Mews.
In the Mews!
Infant! Baby! There are ladies in this world would sell anything. They sell the outside of their bodies. The inside—the
inside,
do you understand me? Piece by piece they sell it off, like at an auction. They do not always walk in the streets and stand under lampposts. Sometimes they sit in mahogany captain’s chairs on leather seats. They eat from linen thick as carpets with forks of soft pure silver. There are toothmarks on my spoons. There are doctors who perform illegal operations. I do not speak of men with breadknives and dirty fingernails in rooms behind stores. I speak of men on Park Avenue, in hospital amphitheaters with the best equipment. There are men that push junk, that water the liquor, the gas, the milk, the currency. I do not speak of muggers in parks, of creeps at windows with their hand on their thing, or rapers and queers. There are men that cripple and others that kill, that fix fights and World Series and prices and wars. There are wheelers and there are dealers.”

“If you’re trying to frighten me—”

“Baby! It
doesn’t
frighten you? I go to the track with these men, we sit in each other’s boxes at the World Series, in Indianapolis for the Five Hundred. In Louisville for the Derby we are on the floors of each other’s hotels, and
I
am frightened of them.”

“Well, of course. I understand that, Nate. But why?”

“Harold Flesh.”

He was in a state of active terror, abandoned to it, yet for all that still trying not so much to deal with it as to preserve it long enough to communicate it to me, his action vaguely heroic, as though I were someone sleeping in a burning house whom he must rouse before he could think of safety for himself. “Nate,” I said.

“The world is not clean.”

“Nate, this—”

“It is not a clean world.”

“I know that. I know it’s not clean. Fixing beyond fixing.”

“So make sense. Be afraid in it.”

“I can take care of myself.”

“Good,” he said. “Good news.”

He took out a cigarette, something I never saw him do in the restaurant, though he smokes heavily at home. His hand shook as he lighted it.

“Nate.”

“Harold Flesh is such a son of a bitch.”

“Why did you want me to see him, Nate?”

“It’s important,” he said. “You know too many movie stars.” He put out the cigarette and stood up. “Have Perry bring you something,” he said and started to go.

“Nate.”

“I have to see. In the kitchen, I have to see.”

“Nate, please. Are you clean?”

He looked at me. “Are you?” I said.

“I’m
shmutzic,”
he said.

“What can you have to do with Harold Flesh?”

“With him? Nothing. I swear it.”

“But—then why do you care?”

“Because,” he said. “Because I’m like you. He’s a champion, ain’t he? From all walks. If they’re champions you tear up the check. Do you understand?”

“Nate, I don’t believe you. Something is on the line.”

“Ah,” he said. He smiled for the first time. “You chiseler. ‘Something is on the line.’ All right. Good. Just one of the things on the line, just
one,
is my place. Who needs that kind of trade? Who needs it? If those guys make it a habit to come here they could ruin me. That kind of trade. Cardinals eat here, for Christ’s sake.” He leaned forward. “In this world there are two kinds. Those who still bother to lie and those who don’t. On the average it is safer and more profitable to deal with those who still bother to lie. Perry!”

Perry came to the table. “Bring Mr. Boswell a nice pot of arctic lichen tea.” He left.

I looked around the room. Across from me, in a round wide booth, the red velvet upholstery tufted and buttoned like the canopied bed of a baby prince, a handsome man toasted a lovely woman. Were they clean, I wondered. Sure they were. In a far corner two middle-aged men—they seemed as unsinister as brokers—chatted amiably. Which one pulled the trigger? I studied the well- dressed, decorous women. Which were the expensive whores? I watched the carefully polite men moving self-consciously back in their chairs as the waiters placed food in front of them. Which was Mr. Big?

I settled dreamily into a contented vision of duplicity. I saw everything twice, the chic surfaces over the dry, stale mass, the vital appearance skin-tight across the unhealthy frame. Nate was wrong, of course, but his vision was the comfortable one. It was not a worthy cynicism, only a step beyond child’s play, a fantasy not of good versus evil, of good guys and bad, but the all- embracing comfort of bad guys and worse. It let one off, this view, as original sin let one off, or some sterile notion of environment. No, if anything, the world was too fine, people
too
good. Who would hold their measly temper tantrums against men who had to die?

In Nate’s Place it was an understandable illusion, an honest mistake. The place was like one of those enormous night clubs in films of the thirties. One automatically dipped the side of one’s jaw before one spoke. Somewhere, one was sure, a code knock would move a wall aside to reveal a casino where people in evening dress gaily gambled and talked about the DA and called their girlfriends “Sister.”

I did not think I wanted to stay to meet Nate’s Harold Flesh. Perhaps he was a bad man, but if he were he would be vaguely comic, too, a type who took himself too seriously or always wore a white carnation or carried a silver dollar for luck. Evil, if it exists, is as rare as virtue. No, it was in making something out of the gray, moral middle ground that greatness lay. That’s why Felix Sandusky, who took flesh and spun it into muscle, was great.

So Harold Flesh, whether he was Professor Moriarty out of Boston Blackie out of Damon Runyon—whether he was, as Nate himself thought he was, the Devil himself— was not someone who could matter very much to me. Horseracing, baseball, boxing. Why, Nate’s devils were boys, children.

I looked again at Nate’s comical room, thinking, sadly, that perhaps it was time to write Nate off as a contact. He had said it himself: I knew too many movie stars. His people were not of that middle distance where things happen. It was too easy to hypnotize myself in my friend Nathan’s nighttime world. As Perry, who only held its leaders’ coats, had—as Nate had. Too easy to get caught up in its real but probably incidental melodrama. Perhaps there were the things Nate said there were in the world, perhaps it was unclean. But it was the humdrum mud in cemeteries which terrified me, not the dust indoors. How little the atrocities Nate described had to do with me anyway, I thought, whose crimes, like most people’s, were merely petty, merely against myself, who picked no pocket, peddled no whore, pushed no dope, did no violence. At that moment it came to me as a revelation that I was just one more good man.

I went to the washroom. The porter did not look at me when I went in and when I left he didn’t get up to brush my jacket. He knew me, knew my circumstances (which in some views are the same). He expected no tip and withheld his services, one more who would deal with me on a professional basis only.

Outside there was a pay phone. I had no change in my pockets. I went back into the toilet and washed my hands slowly in the marble basin. The attendant did not even seem curious at my quick return. He sat reading his paper in his high shoeshine chair, his feet on the brass shoe forms.

“Slow tonight?” I asked.

“Mm-hmm,” he said.

“Tough.”

I could see him in the mirror. He glanced at me for a moment over the top of his paper and then went back to it. Soundlessly I slipped a dime from his plate of change among the bottles of hair lotions and trays of combs and stacks of hand towels on the marble shelf above the washbasin.

“Look,” I said, turning to him, “do you mind some advice?”

He put the paper down.

“Cut your overhead. A guy comes to a place like this, his shoes are already shined.”

“Where would I sit?” he asked.

“Well, that’s a point.”

I started to leave. “Say,” I said, “did you know Harold Flesh is going to be in tonight?”

He smiled. “Not bad,” he Said, “not bad.”

“You know him?”

“He used to pee over at Lou Mizer’s old ‘Monte Carlo’ when I was there.”

“Well, he’s coming in tonight.”

“Not bad,” he said. I pushed the door open. “Mr. Flesh is a good tipper,” he said.

“There are wheelers and there are dealers,” I said and walked out.

I called Penn Station. “When’s the next train to Philadelphia?”

There was one at ten o’clock. I looked at my watch. It was eight-thirty.

In the end, however, I did not go; in the end I had to stay and see him. In the end an important person is an important person.

At about eleven o’clock Perry came over to my table with a message from Nate. “He wants to see you in the private dining room. He wonders if you will take coffee with him at the table of Harold Flesh.”

“Yes, Perry. Thank you.” I got up to go. “Oh, Perry,” I said, “Have you got your gun?”

“I lead them to the table,” Perry said, “but you,
you
sit down with them!”

October 27, 1953. New York City.

Dr. Morton Perlmutter is not an archeologist. He is an anthropologist, and it was announced in Stockholm today that he has just won the Nobel Prize.

November 1, 1953. Philadelphia.

Last year I followed the campaign trains of both Eisenhower and Stevenson. I’d be there, right beneath the platform, as they came to the rear of their trains to address the crowds. (It was interesting. I used my strength to force my way through the crowds. Only the old ladies knew I wouldn’t hit them, whereas such is the illusion of continued virility in man that old men thought themselves vulnerable at eighty.) My technique was always the same. I would let the candidate make his opening remarks and then, as he came to the essence of his talk, I would begin to raise and unroll a banner I carried with me on two long poles. Carefully spreading the poles I would take up the slack gently until the unfurled banner was level with and just in front of the candidate’s face. The message was simple. If Eisenhower was speaking, it read “STEVENSON”; if Stevenson, “EISENHOWER.”

The campaign failed (I speak of my own). It cost a lot of money and a lot of time and it was silly. I had meant to gain attention with the strategy of schoolboys punching little girls on the arms. But though there were moments when I seemed to anger Eisenhower and made Stevenson wistful and perhaps a little sad, I realize now that mostly I must have appeared ridiculous to the two men. They expected such nuts and wrote us off beforehand, like a restaurant anticipating the “shrinkage” of its spoons. (I have since met Mr. Stevenson and when I reminded him of the incidents he recalled them vividly. He told me that they had seemed to him at the time symbolic, and that each time I showed up a little more energy had gone out of his campaign. He seems to think that if he could have maintained his confidence he might have gone on to win the election. Perhaps he was just being kind. I am naturally inclined toward for-want-of-a nail constructs anyway, but even if I were not I should want to believe this one. I have the hard-minded perversity of the humdrum and insist on influencing events, even if only negatively, and even—sadly—against my own and everyone else’s better interests. What the hell? If that’s the price, that’s the price. Everybody dies.)

I am the sort of person who is good at salvaging at least
something
from bad situations. They should put me to work reclaiming fresh water from the sea. I had made a fool of myself, had spent money wastefully, had disappointed or angered everyone with whom I had come into contact. Yet I came away from that foolish campaign with something of value; I formed a new impression of the great. Since then I have had it again in all its original force.