It was astonishing to him how well they knew the jargon. He would have thought they would have no notion of all the stages involved in earning a doctorate, but almost every one of them had a precise understanding of his graduate status. Their children had familiarized them with it, their married sons and daughters off in universities. Learning was old hat to them, the crises and obstacles as familiar as a fever chart. They’d broken the code. “Yes,” he said wearily, “my first two chapters are written. I’m on my third.”
“Then you’re sitting pretty,” Salmi said, “it sounds to me like you can work at home. You can do your footnotes later at a library. You can work up your bibliography afterwards.”
“That’s right.”
“You’ve got to get out of that apartment. It was better when you rode the buses. As it is, you’re around more than the vegetables. Get a clipboard and write at the pool. You got a clipboard?”
“No.”
“We’ll get you one. We’ll get you a pith helmet and suntan lotion.”
“I haven’t been elected yet.”
“A formality. Tomorrow morning you’ll be up on the high chair with a whistle on your neck.”
He agreed to stand for lifeguard.
One thing puzzled him: Harris had said Salmi was reluctant to have him. That afternoon when he went down to the office to sign some papers Fanon had left for him he ran into Harris and mentioned what was on his mind.
“Salmi,” Harris said lightly, “Salmi’s a figurehead. It’s a puppet regime.”
In fact he was elected, but not before the threat of a runoff between himself and Skippy Fisher, an old vaudevillian who was very popular with the residents. In the twenties Skippy had been a feature performer in The Ziegfeld Follies. It was said that he’d introduced “Melancholy Baby.” When Preminger heard about the tie he refused to run against the old-timer and withdrew his candidacy. There wasn’t anything Salmi could say to get him to change his mind. But Preminger reluctantly agreed when the President asked for a few hours to try to work out a deal.
Two hours later Salmi appeared, smiling. “Congratulations,” he said, “all the precincts have been heard from. It’s you.”
“What about Skippy Fisher?”
“Skippy’s pulled out. He’s withdrawn his name from nomination.”
“Why?”
“He pulled out. He sees it isn’t for him.”
“What happened? What did you do?”
Salmi smiled. “I said there’d be a whispering campaign. I told him I’d tell people that what he really introduced was ‘She’s Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage’—real golden oldies. I said I’d let everyone know he’s incontinent, that he makes weewee in the swimming pool. That even if he managed to save you he’d pee all over you.”
“Jesus,” said Preminger. “The Making of the Lifeguard, 1971.”
“Don’t worry about it. They didn’t really want him. He was the sentimental favorite. When you get to be our age, sonny, you can’t always bring yourself to violate your feelings.”
So Preminger, newly orphaned Montana scholar, the faint smell of smoke from the back room still lingering in his nostrils, through bald power plays released a college boy to return to active duty and at thirty-seven years of age and for the duration of a capricious heat spell, became the duly elected lifeguard pro tem of the Harris Towers Condominium on the North Side of Chicago. It was the first elected position he had ever held, his single incumbency and, he had to admit, his best prospect, the only game in town.
What was astonishing to him was how quickly and completely he assumed the badges of his office, how comfortable they made him feel and how powerful. He’d had hints of something like it before: several summers back, on his one trip to Europe, he’d left his hotel and been wandering the streets of Rome when, turning a corner, he’d come suddenly upon the Colosseum. He’d seen pictures of it, but always before he’d merely glossed its reality, the Colosseum as a possibility not actually registering; yet there it really was in the street, as anything might have been in the street; it wasn’t — this struck him as odd — even guarded; he might have pulled off a piece of one of its shaggy stones and slipped it in his pocket and gone off with it, a piece of the actual, honest-to-God Colosseum in his pocket. Important things actually existed and they had the effect on you they were supposed to have, a Lourdes efficacy in nature and history that was astonishing; yet one rarely took the fabulous enough for granted. He discovered afresh how vulnerable, like all men, he was to play, to signs and the simple power of images, what tremendous realities adumbrated in a toy. Strap a holster about your waist and the body automatically adjusts, the center of gravity shifts, the pelvis boasts and you sway, lope, bowleggedness in the centers of the brain. Sing sea chanteys in a canoe and feel love’s moods in parks.
There really was a whistle. There really was a high wooden platform chair with a beach umbrella blooming from it. There were sun lotions and mysterious silver pastes for the cheekbone beneath each eye, like the warpaint of Indians. There were quires of Turkish towels, neatly folded and giving off from their stacks a sort of glowing energy like that which came from place settings in restaurants before anyone has eaten. There were sunglasses for the King of the State Troopers. There was a first-aid kit. In it were bandages, adhesive, Atabrine tablets, salt tablets, smelling salts, Mercurochrome, iodine, salves seasoned with antibiotics. There was a syringe and, God help him, a hypodermic already fitted with a single ampoule of morphine. There was digitalis.
He sat on his high platform and surveyed the pool, his eyes sharp, his concentration immense. He might have been riding shotgun in a helicopter over the Pacific hunting astronauts, or in a small plane above the Alaskan tundra looking for survivors. Or he strode along the pool’s concrete apron — his feet wet, slapping down smart footprints as he went along — or occasionally stooped, hunkered down, lowering his hand into the seemingly blue water to palm a handful and draw it toward his mouth, licking his tongue into it like a dog to taste the chlorine level. (Though they had an agreement. A janitor saw to the actual maintenance of the pool, while Preminger reserved the right to spray down its concrete deck with the hose.) His great pleasure made him guarded, suspicious of himself, wary lest he abuse the authority to which he had so quickly and luxuriously adapted. Not only religious, he thought, not only God-fearing, but at rock bottom an incipient Fascist as well! What a rogue! I must vow to use my power for good.
And he actually made some such vow, determining to play ball with the residents, to look the other way when they brought drinking glasses down to the pool, things to nosh — strictly forbidden — or when they went in without first using the footbath. On his own initiative he even suspended Sunday rules from time to time and told oldsters whose grandchildren had come to visit them that he would admit them to the pool. He was a stickler for water safety only — something which, with these old-timers, was not a problem anyway. Bridge and kalooky players, mahjongg enthusiasts (there was something curiously Oriental in the way they silently passed the tiles back and forth to each other, studiously picking over the ivory like children examining pieces of Lego) did not chase each other around the outside of the pool or push one another into the water. They did not leap two and three and four from the diving board or play Cannonball, jumping up and clasping their knees to their stomachs to pounce upon the heads of the other swimmers. In fact, they did not even go into the water much — once in the morning, perhaps, to wade in the shallow end and maybe again in the afternoon to tread water for a while and get their suits wet. A few of the more ambitious women and some of the men would occasionally dog-paddle or sidestroke a length or two of the pool, but except for these times when Preminger was all business it was pretty much a sinecure. With their cooperation, born of age and of that in them which was inflexibly sedentary, he managed to run a pretty tight swimming pool.