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.