We looked at each other and I smiled from across years, in love, inviting her to love me, inviting her to let me screw her right there on the deep, profound brown carpet. She would have let me, I know, if only the light had been better and she could have seen my eyes and realized who and what I was. (That is no argument, of course. They all would.)
Instead, she smiled back and said, “Yes?” It was code if ever I heard code. I understood. It was the most gracious, the wittiest thing any woman had ever said to me.
“Mr. Rail,” I said right back to her. She knew what I meant.
“What is your name, please?” she asked.
“It’s James Boswell. I am James Boswell,” I said, getting several dozen levels of meaning into the remark.
She said something I couldn’t hear, but I knew that it was my name and that she was communicating somehow with inner offices, with upper echelons, that even now the name was being spoken into machines, that cards gave it back unrecognized, professing ignorance.
In a few seconds she turned her head slightly as if in a listening position. “I’m sorry, Mr. Boswell,” she said, “you don’t seem to be on the appointment schedule.”
“I’m not.”
“Mr. Rail won’t see you,” she said sympathetically. It was a kind of warning. It was enough for me that she understood.
“Come away with me,” I said suddenly.
“I can’t do that, Mr. Boswell,” she said.
“Please,” I said. “Say my name. Say ‘Jim.’”
“I can’t do that,” she said.
“Who are you kidding?” I said roughly. I indicated the deep, profound brown space around us. “This isn’t Western Civilization,” I said.
“It’s what we have instead of Western Civilization,” she said. “You know that.”
“Of course.” I gazed intensely at her. “One day I’ll be back,” I said. “One day I’ll have an appointment and be back. Perhaps then.”
“Good luck,” she said. “Good luck… Jim.”
“Yes.”
“Goodbye, Jim.”
In the elevator, going down, I listened carefully to the seventy-two-second symphony. As long as either of us lived, I knew it would be our song.
That scheme I had for suing celebrities and settling out of court was pretty harebrained. It’s different for a girl. If worse comes to worse a girl can always throw a paternity suit at a movie star, but what chance do I have? And unfortunately I’m too damn big for anybody to beat up in a night club. Suing for plagiarism might get me into the offices of one or two network presidents, but there’s no future in that. Too costly. Too risky. Besides, I of all people mustn’t start screwing around with the law.
I’ve been doing all right, I suppose, but it’s slow, it’s slow. I meet these guys one by one and only after fairly arduous campaigns. It’s like doing piecework. One-fell- swoopism, that’s my philosophy. Some sort of club is the only way, I know, but who’s in a position? Of course I might always be able to marry contact the way others marry money — but then I’d have to share. These goddamned community property laws are a menace.
Something has happened. My uncle Myles was buried this afternoon. Launched in his wooden box, he seemed more like some object on loan from a museum than a human being. He is low in the earth now.
I was struck, at the funeral, by how lone a figure my Uncle Myles was. There were mourners — more, I suppose, than I might have expected — but I didn’t recognize many of them. It seems unlikely that this is simply a consequence of our estrangement. He had been an obscure Mason and the Masons buried him and some of them came to see the job they had done. And I recognized his doctor, a man whose presence at his patient’s funeral apparently did not strike him as in the least ironic. He was as professional as ever; this might have been simply another call. Certainly, when he took me aside at the chapel, cautious to steer me wide of the trestle on which my uncle’s coffin lay, to tell me that my uncle had been a gravely — that was his word — ill man for whom medicine could do nothing, it might have been only another diagnostic conference beyond the patient’s bedroom. I remembered these from the time when I still lived with my uncle, and I experienced again the same peculiar mixture of boredom and conspiracy. Oddly, my knowledge of my uncle’s death was simply an extension of my knowledge of his illness. That he could not know of his own death seemed to deepen it somehow, as his naïveté about his sickness when he lived had made that more profound.
I was impatient with the doctor’s insistence on giving me the details, though I understood that it was simply the logical consequence of his function, as though his job was finally advisory, admonitory, his position that of a man who explained death rather than of one who could cure it or hold it off.
The others at the funeral were, I supposed, fellow lawyers and one or two of my uncle’s strange, pathetic clients. Perhaps some were the few mysterious friends he would visit sometimes in the evening. (I remembered, guiltily, how glad I had been to come home and find my uncle gone.) They were the raggle-taggle crew even the loneliest of us can claim, irrelevant to our existences but solidly there in our lives despite that. (I think of all the hotel clerks whose faces are familiar to me, of all the elevator operators.) They were the supernumeraries with whom finally we spend more time than with those we dream of, as though the landscape of our lives has always to be filled with people, crowds, masses, populations, the tradesman who brings the bread, perhaps, the man who waits with us each day at the bus stop, those yeasty populations of the unknown, there by accident, to whom we talk and talk and talk. They are legion. How many words, I wonder, can have passed between us? How many gestures of affection or civility?
Someone said my name. My uncle’s minister was beside me. “When I’ve prayed, Jim, I’d like you to speak.”
“I couldn’t. What could I say?”
“You’re his only survivor,” the minister said. “Just offer a few words for the repose of his spirit.”
“Wait. I wouldn’t know what to say.”
But the minister had already gone up to the side of the grave and opened his Bible. I barely heard his prayers; my mind was full of the things I might say. Though they all seemed hypocritical, there was something pleasant, even thrilling, in the idea of speaking there. It was like being a guest of honor, or the best witch at a birthday party. Nevertheless, I didn’t know what I could say about my uncle, and I looked down before the minister could catch my eye.
“I’ve asked Myles’ nephew, Mr. James Boswell, to address his thoughts to this sad occasion,” the minister said finally.
Someone touched my arm and I moved up beside the grave. “I’ve been asked to speak,” I said. “I didn’t know this was a custom. I’m unprepared.” I felt silly. Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking, I thought giddily.