Searches & Seizures (36 page)

In the next few days the weather turned very hot, and the central air conditioning, taxed to the limit, could barely cope. Taking his bench with him, Preminger moved his mourning out onto the balcony to try to catch a fresh breeze; there, facing southeast, he could see Chicago’s skyline, the tall apartments of Lake Shore Drive, downtown, Hancock’s startling skyscraper. But the heat was absurd, absolute. He stood at the railing and stared down into the cool turquoise of the swimming pool, then and there abandoning his
shivah.

He had no bathing suit, of course, and walked to the shopping center to buy one. At the entrance to the pool the lifeguard turned him back. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but the pool is reserved for the exclusive use of residents and their guests.”

“I’m a resident.”

The boy took out a mimeographed list. “Your name, sir?”

“Marshall Preminger.”

“Oh,” he said, setting his list aside, “are you related to Mr. Preminger?”

“I’m his son. I live here now.”

“Sir, I’m not doubting your word, but you see in this building the residents all wear blue wristbands. Like the one that woman has on.” He pointed to a sort of strap, rather like a garter or the tag worn by patients in hospitals. Other people wore yellow or red bands, but everybody seemed to have one.

“I see other colors too.”

“The yellow bands are for guests. It’s a code. In this building the guests wear yellow. The red is for visiting residents from another building. In their own pools they might wear yellow bands and the guests would wear blue or red, and their guests yellow.”

“I don’t have a blue band.”

“Sir, all residents are issued a resident band plus two visiting resident and three guest bands.”

“I don’t have any.”

“Sir, your father…I was sorry to hear about what happened. I was teaching him to dive. I saw him do a terrific jack-knife, and the next day he was dead. Your father never swam without his blue band. Did you look around the apartment?” Preminger shook his head. “That might be a good idea. I’m sure you’ll find them.”

“I’m certain I will. I’ll look for them as soon as I go upstairs.”

“Sir,” the lifeguard said, “these rules were set up by the residents themselves. I haven’t the authority to suspend them.” He lowered his voice and spoke confidentially. “Sir, people are watching. You’re putting me on the spot. Could you look for the bands now? As a favor to me?”

Preminger shrugged, went back up to the apartment and searched high and low. When he couldn’t find them and called the office, they told him that no bands had been turned in. They suggested he look for different colored bands and swim as a visiting resident in one of the other pools. He returned to the pool and, brushing past the lifeguard, jumped into the water. He felt people staring at his naked wrists. It was as if he were skinny-dipping.

“Hey,” a fat woman called roughly. “Hey, you!” Preminger continued to swim. The heavy woman went over to the lifeguard and spoke to him and the lifeguard blew his whistle listlessly. Ignoring him, Preminger swam on. The lifeguard, looking sheepish, returned to his post, but the woman followed him and the boy, nodding miserably and setting his pith helmet on the seat beside him, jumped into the water and swam after Preminger.

“Please,” he said, “you’ll have to leave the pool, Mr. Preminger.”

“I can’t find the damned bands. I looked everywhere.”

“Sir,” he said, treading water powerfully and trying to keep his voice gentle, “I’m a college man. I depend on these people for tips. You can petition for a reissue. Why don’t you just get out now?”

“It’s too goddamn hot,” Preminger said stubbornly. “I’m not getting out.” He turned away from the boy and swam toward the deep end of the pool. Hearing clean, powerful chops behind him, he realized he was being followed. Though he hadn’t raced in years, he tried to get away, but in five strokes the lifeguard caught him.

“Sir,” he said, “I’m sorry,” and Preminger felt himself captured, the lifeguard’s strong arm across his chest and under his chin. It was an official Red Cross lifesaving hold and it was being used against him! Somehow this was more humiliating than anything that had yet happened, and he began to struggle furiously.

“That’s right, sir,” the boy whispered, “pretend you’re drowning.”

Preminger considered the proposition.

“Help,” he said weakly, “help, help.”

“That’s it,” the kid said softly, then louder, “
it’s all right, sir, I’ve got you.
” He felt himself towed sidestroke toward shore. He closed his eyes to avoid the stares of the others, then felt his body scrape bottom at the shallow end. The lifeguard helped him to stand, and with Preminger’s arm around the boy’s shoulder they climbed up the steps. When they were out of the pool he coughed a few times and the lifeguard pounded his back.

“Thanks,” Preminger said stiffly, “you saved my life. I’ll always be in your debt. How can I ever repay you?”

“
Sir, forget it,
” the kid shouted, “
it’s my job. It’s all in a day’s work.
” They shook hands formally and Preminger started back to the apartment.

He passed the fat woman. “Faker,” she hissed, “you weren’t drownding.”

“I was,” Preminger said, “I
was
drownding.”

Pride, he thought in the apartment afterwards, his chest still constricted from the encounter: the Preminger Curse. There was a floating fury in the low-keyed man, Preminger’s underground river. A health factor like a trick knee or a predisposition to allergy. Preminger the Proud, Seismological Preminger, quite simply blew up at a snub or humiliation. He exploded, bunched other men’s lapels in his fists, slapped faces like a duelist or slammed out incoherencies like a talker in tongues. Why did underwriters ignore it on forms? He took
that
as a snub!

It was a form of snub that had brought on his heart attack. He had gone to keep an appointment with his agent, in his creased, cuffed slacks and open shirt out of uniform beside the lightly summer suited men who rode with him in the elevator. When the operator shut the doors Preminger had sneezed, a tearing detonation too sudden for handkerchiefs, that had come on him like a mugger and left his nose looping viscous ropes like pulleys of mucus. The others made an alarmed nimbus of space around him, like dancers in night clubs for the turns of a virtuoso, while Preminger, panicking, palmed vast handfuls of the stuff and shoved it into his pockets as though it were money picked up in the street. Then the operator turned to him. He’s going to say “Gesundheit,” Preminger thought gratefully; he’s going to turn it into a joke. “What floor do
you
want?” the man said, and Preminger was on him, his anger bigger than the sneeze itself. “You never asked
them,
you son of a bitch. You ask
them,
you cheap fuckshit, you goddamn errand boy, you ass stink and cunt grease,” punching him about the head and shoulders with all his might, leaving sticky wisps of snot where he struck. His heart stopped him before the others could and he collapsed on the floor of the elevator.

Now he took his pulse—twenty-seven for fifteen seconds, four times twenty-seven’s a hundred eight—and swallowed two Valiums. Recognizing his vulnerability he could do nothing about it. On the mourner’s bench (despite the fact that he was no longer sitting
shivah,
he continued to go there as to a neutral corner) he cursed the lifeguard, wishing him dead, mutilated, cramped and drowning in his pool, electrocuted by a faulty underwater light. Only his anger, hair of the dog, calmed him, and gradually he steadied down. “I must be nuts,” he said aloud. “I’m a crazy.” He thought of himself in the elevator in the crummy pants and shirt, his shabby shoes, of pushing past the lifeguard to jump naked-wristed into the swimming pool. Jesus, he thought, if I don’t stop violating the dress codes I’m a dead man. Where do I get my fury? he wondered. What nutty notions of my character come on me? What is it with me? Where do I think I am—where three roads meet?

The phone rang. It was Evelyn Riker. She called to tell him that she’d found his father’s blue wristband. “It was wrapped around the letters in the box. I was upset or I would have noticed.”

“So you heard about that, did you?”

“I heard you almost drowned.”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll put it in an envelope and leave it for you at the office.”

“Yeah, thanks.”

When he hung up he went to the desk where she’d found the letters. He poked around in it, reaching deep into drawers, and pulled out the five missing red and yellow bands, plus a green band that the lifeguard had not told him about. “This must be the contraband,” he said.

The
shivah
had been broken. If he still used the mourner’s bench it was out of some vestigial need for the dramatically reflexive. Now he had a signature, a gesture, a theme, something associated with him, if invisibly. (No one saw him on it.) There was something inexplicably counterclockwise in him like a mysterious effect in physics, as personal and offbeat as a sailor hat indoors on a businessman. Watching the color TV from the mourner’s bench, his bare feet—for comfort now—extended, he thought that perhaps he could establish a Premingerian trend, a fad, a novelty, a first. He would bring mourner’s benches back into the living room. Though, again, no one saw him. He leaped to his feet if the bell rang, if there was a knock on the door, if the telephone sounded, and remained there several minutes after his visitor had gone or the phone had been replaced. What the occasional delivery person, the rare condolence caller from the South Side saw was the vacant bench itself, looking in its woody contact-paper like something left behind after a child’s log cabin has been struck. If the style caught on it would be brought back to the world misunderstood, like a Balkan mannerism or Asian idiom. To all eyes he seemed to steer clear, giving a wide berth to the bench.

Two nights following his little drama at the pool, the night his
shivah
would formally have ended had he not already suspended it, he had visitors. Seven men and four women, a jury of his peers manqué. Not individually familiar to him, though he thought he might have seen a few of them and one or two might even have been in his house, he recognized even before they spoke that they had come as a group. His behind still tingled with the austere, ghostly caress of the hard mourner’s bench and he felt a sort of mixed curiosity and low-intensity outrage at the sight of them. How dare these people, so patently a band (the fact that there were so many of them was a sure sign that they had not
all
been able to make it—and, oh, he thought, what low time is it in my life that I have taken to counting my guests?—who clearly would have had to have
arranged
this call, who didn’t look like brothers and sisters or husbands and wives or fathers and daughters), take it for granted, after their own elaborate arrangements with each other, that he would be there without first ringing up? Did they count him as he had counted them? Yes, that’s how it was. They had his number.

“Mr. Preminger, how do you do?” a man hidden behind the others in the corridor said. “We have not yet had the pleasure. I am Mr. Salmi, first president of H.T.R.A., the Harris Towers Residents Association.”

My God, Preminger thought, the Father of my Condominium!

“These good people—may we come in?—are associated with me on the Committee of Committees.” Preminger stood aside. “They are chairmen of the various committees that exist in our condominium to enrich the social and cultural life of the residents, make our bylaws, establish liaison between residents and management, and adjudicate complaints.”

“I found the wristbands,” Preminger said.

“Forgive if you will our vigilante aspect. We are here to welcome and invite. Normally, of course, Miriam—Mrs. Julius Schreiber—would have been by to do this, but your father died while Mrs. Schreiber was abroad.”

“She’s still there,” someone said.

“So this extraordinary convocation has no purpose other than to bid you welcome and to officially acknowledge the Towers’ sadness at Phil’s—your father’s—passing.”

“Hear hear.”

“You know,” Salmi said, “we don’t normally jump all over a new resident like this. Harris Towers is first of all our home; only secondly is it our community. I’m not going to talk a lot of Mickey Mouse to you. We don’t, for example, even have our own flag like a lot of the condominiums do. The management had one designed, but we voted not to fly it. The Stars and Stripes is good enough for us. Still, for many of the residents—I don’t except myself—Harris Towers has provided the first opportunity we’ve ever had to participate on a pragmatic, viable level in the shaping of the quality of the community life. I want to underscore that word ‘participate.’ I’ll be coming back to it, if you’ll bear with me, more than once tonight. May I sit down, Mr. Preminger—Marshall?”

Preminger waved him to a seat.

“Listen,” Salmi said, leaning forward, “we’ve got a piece of Chicago here that belongs to us. Do you gather my meaning? What we do with it isn’t anybody’s business but our own. I’m talking about the principle of anything between consenting adults—not on the smut level, you understand. This is a great principle, a
great
principle. One of the great ideas of Western Man. We can use this place as an ordinary bedroom complex—a home first, I said, you’ll remember—or we can reach out and touch our environment, shape it for good or ill. The choice is each individual’s to make, and the choice is
ours.
Boy oh boy, I must sure sound corny to you. I must sure sound like a fanatic. But wait, you’ll see. But what am I doing monopolizing? I said ‘participate,’ and I
meant
participate. Mr. Ed Eisner has the floor.”