He heard how each had got his condominium, from the initial examination of the site through the decision to join and the payment of the deposit to the moving in, stations of the legend, infinitely the same, infinitely different and, for him, as compelling as an account of lost virginity. He was moved to offer his own variation. “I’m in probate,” he said with his eyes closed.
“Taylor was in probate,” someone said.
“It was different,” said another. “Irene died almost a year before Rose moved in, right after she put down the deposit. Irene never lived here.”
“Probate’s a technicality. It’s as good as yours.”
“Possession is nine-tenths of the law.”
They spoke of individual courtesies shown them by Harris, of cocktail parties given for them when all that had existed of Harris Towers was the architect’s model, of a dance at the Standard Club five years earlier, some of the women in gowns they had bought for the occasion, their husbands in black tie for the only time in their lives save for getting married or for their children’s weddings. “It was beautiful. Freda, wasn’t it beautiful?”
“Harris had the mayor’s caterer for the evening.”
Those were the days, they said, when the condominium was just a dream. And Harris the dreamer. A young Aeneas in the myth. Themselves cast as skeptics, historical obstacle, stunned only retroactively by the cutting edge of his bold imagination, like self-confessed victims in anecdote, all admiration now for the force of his enterprise, his vision which had seen the three buildings already standing when all that had existed was an abandoned warehouse surrounded by vacant lot and prairie. They told of his struggles with the bankers and recounted his wheedling, piecemeal favor by piecemeal favor, his concessions from politicos and zoning big shots and, once, how he’d gotten an actual law through the Chicago City Council, the future condominium’s very own legal and bona fide ordinance, signed by Mayor Daley himself. The legend of how Harris had built the condominium, Preminger saw, was only a universalizing of their individual stories about how they’d come to be a part of it. Yet why couldn’t they speak of him that way? And why had they written off his probate, dismissed it as natural order, ordinary sequence? A life had been lost, death was in it. (And at such moments why did he loathe his swim trunks and wish to put by his whistle and scatter his lotions?) And they spoke of how Harris had recruited his prospects, many of the future residents of the place, a laborious, close-order piece of patient scholarship, choosing and rejecting like some Noah of real estate, a brave man hand-picking his crew, sieving the South Side, as if what he proposed were an expeditionary force or a crusade or a mission in history. (Ah, Preminger saw, because he’d inherited it, because it had fallen in his lap.)
“In nineteen fifty-five he saw that the South Side was going,” said a woman with white hair, “that the colored were making a mockery of the neighborhoods. He understood what was happening to my husband’s business before my husband did.”
“What, are you kidding? During the war he saw it coming, as far back as that.”
“He told me that at the I.C. station at sixty-third and Engelwood he saw a family of hillbillies get off the train, shkutzim, low-class whites from the cottonfields, and he knew what was going to happen. This was in nineteen forty-seven.”
“This was before he had money. This was before the banks would even look at him.”
“Now they ask him.”
How comfortable Preminger is nevertheless, how close to sleep. If someone were to call for help now he could not move, his lassitude locking him up in warm baths of the intimate. He lies back on the chaise longue and watches them, sees their heavy busts in profile, the huge passive breasts of other listeners rising and falling, the deep unconscious percussion of their breath. The fat thighs of the speaker, the muddle of hair at her crotch, her legs wide, stately, an abandon that is at once rigid and relaxed like the lines of upholstered furniture. He hopes the heat will last forever. He hopes his bladder will never fill. He wishes never to move, simply to be there always, their talk climbing the white, hairless insides of his arms like flies. Blood moves in his penis as he listens. His clipboard and his scant notes lay abandoned across his knees. He nudges it aside and it falls to the concrete, a heavy weight gone. He loves their voices cracked by age and child bearing, by lullabies and screaming their children out of streets and the paths of cars.
“Julie never wanted to come here. Julie wanted Florida. He wanted the excitement of the dog track and the jai alai. You know what I got against Florida? I got nothing against Florida. It’s the way they dress. The loud shirts and Bermudas and the cockamamy sailfish on the men’s caps. And the slacks on the women. People our age look foolish dressed like that. You’d think they’d have better sense.”
“The kids don’t come to Florida.”
“They come. Christmas they come. They come and they leave the children with you, and then off they go, off like a shot to the Doral and the Fontainebleau, and you’re the baby sitter. You see them at three in the morning when the night clubs close.”
“All my friends are in Chicago. I’d be a stranger in Florida.”
Individual hairs of his head stand stirred by their collective breath. He has never been this relaxed, even in barbershops under warm towels. He knows now how much he wants to lie in rooms where others are talking, to graze in orbit round their monologues. If they noticed him something would be lost, his euphoria bruised by their attention. He’s held by these matrons, by their legends of founding, the condominium an Athens, feeding him the only history he has ever cared for. Condominium. He thinks the word. It hums. Mmn. Mmn. Mom is in it. Om is.
It’s Saturday. It’s Sunday. (Has he eaten? Has he been upstairs at all?) Those who are not widows have been joined by their husbands. (And how pale these are compared to the women, how marked for probate.) He listens, listens. He loves their voices too, the hoarse voices of the men, this one a printer forty years, his lungs damp, mildewed with ink, scratched and scorched by metal filings, enough case in them by now to set a short sentence, loves the guttural bark of the wholesaler in fruits and vegetables, the rumble of the one who has spent his life in underground parking garages, the screech of the man who has supervised kitchens in hotels. The men’s voices fertilize the women’s. Their sounds fuck. The lifeguard merged with the group beside the pool, neither raised above them on the platform nor cruising beneath them in the water doing the lifesaver’s imposing laps, leading his body through a narrow wake like the long welts of allergy, incognito in boxer trunks, in his tanned son-in-law’s body, his arm along one of the heavy metal tables cut to hold a pole that blooms a sunshade. His ass in a cat’s cradle of plastic sling, the tightly wound strips like huge lanyards from summer camp engraving his calves. Many such impressions here — the backs of men’s legs, women’s backs and arms taking the mold, their skins a sort of stationery, raised letter invitations — Preminger wanly concupiscent at these stains of flesh and contact, the pink stripes of blood like foot and fingerprint, like the red hemioval bite of a toilet seat or elastic’s pucker on the skin. Shoeless as a shivah and sockless too, his naked heels crossed on the hot concrete.