“Takes guts,” Colper said.
“I think we have a young man here who’s no hypocrite,” Shirley Fanon said.
“I’m not listening to this,” Marshall said, and fled to the front where his father’s coffin lay open. He looked inside; he might have been watching the sea from the deck of a ship.
“Gee,” Harris said, coming up beside him and looking down too, “that’s some tan.”
“The pool,” Fanon said.
“Maybe the pool, maybe the solarium,” Colper said.
“Anyway, the little extras that maintenance pays for,” Fanon said. “We’ll split the difference. He took advantage of all of them. He lived way up on the fifteenth floor and rode shit out of the elevator.”
“What do you want?” Marshall asked them.
“We didn’t hound him,” Harris said. “Don’t look at me reproachfully. That man lays there dead of his own accord. Voices weren’t raised. Nobody nagged him, nobody dunned. No threats were made, we never served a summons. Two times, maybe three, the gentleman’s letter went out over my signature, last names and misters.”
“ ‘We feel that you may have overlooked…’ ” Fanon said. “ ‘If you have already remitted, kindly disregard…’ ”
“Like a four flush was a piece of amnesia,” Colper said.
“Like he was an absent-minded professor.”
“We knew he was strapped,” Fanon said. “That every day the furniture truck came.”
“He owed seven months’ maintenance,” Harris said. “Two thousand one hundred dollars. But who’s counting at a time like this?”
“In a week it’ll be eight months,” Fanon said.
“Let’s walk away from the coffin, please,” Harris said. He put his hand on Marshall’s sleeve. “Appreciate my position, Mr. Preminger. Real estate’s involved here. Titles and certificates. A condominium’s a delicate thing. Speaking statutorily. Shirley’s the legal eagle. Explain to him, Shirl.”
Fanon told Preminger that though he would probably get clear title to the place, the will would have to be probated. He named the various steps in the procedure. It could take anywhere from nine months to a year. In the meanwhile the maintenance — which by law he wasn’t required to pay until he held clear title — would continue to build up. He could owe them almost six thousand dollars before the condominium was his.
“I’ll sell it. I’ll put it on the market,” Preminger said.
“Well, you can’t do that until the will’s been probated.”
“I’ll sublet.”
“You’d need dispensation from the court. The dockets are logjammed. Anyway, the money would have to go into escrow. You’d still be responsible for the three hundred every month.”
He didn’t have that kind of money.
They knew that. They suspected that. Why didn’t they do this then? Why didn’t they take out an option to buy the unit?
Harris broke in. “Give it to him straight. The heir here wants to hear lump sums.”
“We’ll give you six thousand dollars for an option,” Fanon said. This would wipe out his father’s debt, with enough left over to take care of the maintenance payments while the will was being probated. Then, when he had clear title, they would pay him fifty thousand dollars, less the six they had advanced on the option.
“What about the furnishings?”
“Well, that’s what the extra five thousand is for.”
“That stuff cost my father twenty.”
“Go sell it.” Harris said. “See what you’d get.”
“I’m getting screwed. It’s a ridiculous offer. You’re offering me fifty thousand for sixty-five thousand dollars’ worth of apartment, then taking back six thousand for maintenance.” It was true, but strangely he did not feel its truth. He had a sense of the awful depreciation in things. He understood — or rather, understood that there was no understanding — the crazy fluctuations in value. It was as if a spirit resided and moved in objects, tossing and turning, a precarious health in things, irregular, fluxy as pulse and temperature and the blood chemistries. The market went up and it went down. Rhetoric feebly tried to account for the unaccountable, but its arguments were always as whacky as the defenses of alchemy, elaborate as theories of assassination. Value’s laws were undiscoverable, undemonstrable finally, as the notion of life on distant planets. (When he was still lecturing, hadn’t he once paid a thousand a month for a cottage on Cape Cod which couldn’t have cost more than ten thousand to build? In those days, didn’t his own fees vary anywhere from one to three hundred dollars a night for the same lecture?) Perhaps nothing more than mood lay at the bottom of it all. They were cheating him, but there was nothing personal in it, and he did not feel badly used. He turned down their offer anyway.
Harris considered him evenly. “You owe me two thousand one hundred dollars. If you have already remitted, kindly disregard.”
“I’ll pay,” Preminger said.
Harris shrugged and took off his yarmulke.
“I’m moving in,” Preminger said. It hadn’t occurred to him till he said it. He knew his life was changed. “Mr. Fanon?”
“Yes?”
“Were you the one who called me?”
Fanon nodded.
“Did you make these funeral arrangements?”
“That’s right.”
“Another two thousand?”
“More like three.”
“I’ll pay,” he said. “I’ll pay whatever I’m supposed to.” He felt valetudinarian. A graceful lassitude. All he wanted was to be in bed in his father’s apartment. Thank God, he thought, he had the key. They would have to kill him to take it from him. His life was altered. Later he would make the arrangements. Everything would go smoothly. A life like his, even an altered one, could be lived in Montana or in Chicago. It made no difference.
A limousine called for him on Sunday and took him, the only passenger, to the chapel. Then he rode alone in it to the cemetery. For a time he tried to speak to the driver, miles forward of him in the strange car, but the man’s perfect manners and funereal deference made it difficult. Preminger turned oddly condolent by the man’s performance, attempted to reassure him and said a strange thing: “It’s all right. I’m not tumbled by grief. My father and I weren’t close these last years. I’m from out of town. Someone else made these arrangements. I’m not overcome or anything.”
“You don’t know what you are,” the driver answered.
So instead of talking he took stock of the appointments in the Cadillac, the individual air-conditioning controls, the electric windows and a panel in the door beside him that slid back to reveal a cigar lighter. There were three separate reading lights in the back. What was curious about luxury was the low opinion it gave you of yourself because you had not anticipated your needs as cleverly as people who did not even know you. He could not get used to the stern ideals manifest in the car’s appointments. This is what some people expect, he thought, and felt depressed not only because he did not expect these things himself but because he could not think of anyone he knew who did. The driver, casually using the strange gauges and controls which to Preminger, spying them from the distant back seat, were as complicated as instruments in remote technologies, seemed unconscious of the car. They could have been riding in a ’58 Chevy.
Then he knew what was so awful. How comfortable he was — as if master upholsterers had taken his measure, fitting the car to him more perfectly than any chair he’d ever sat in. The climate was equally perfect, post-card temperature, the low humidity of deep sleep. Subtle adjustments had been made for his clothing, all that he carried in his pockets, where his hair thinned revealing scalp, environment molding itself to him, to the skin of his wrists and his ankles within their light sheath of stocking, to his toes in their woody envelope of shoe. It was as if his chemistry were known, published like secret papers. Someone had a fix on him. Though they rode in silence, the sounds of the thick traffic outside velvetized to mellow plips and hisses, he felt seduced by arguments. He could literally have ridden like this forever. He wanted never to reach the cemetery, always to follow his father’s hearse through the traffic of the world, the limousine’s headlights shining in broad day, a signal, right of way theirs like something constitutional.