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By Root 6165 0

the plastic surgery and how the skin would be sliced and tucked back. He added that I had plenty of backhair left which could be transplanted to the top. Senator Proxmire had it done and for a time wore a turban on the Senate floor. He had claimed a deduction, disallowed by the IRS—but one could try again. I considered these suggestions but realized presently that I must stop this foolishness! I must fix my whole attention on the great and terrible matters that had put me to sleep for decades. Besides, something might be done at the front of a person but what about the rear? Even if the baggy eyes were fixed and the hair was fixed, wasn’t there still the back of my neck? I was trying on a fancy check overcoat at Saks not long ago and in the triple mirror I saw how fissured, how deeply hacked I was between the ears.

I bought the coat anyway, Renata urged me to, and I was wearing it today. When I got out at the county building, giant Mrs. Sunderland said, “Golly, what a jazzy coat!”

twenty

Renata and I had met in this same skyscraper, the new county building, while doing jury duty.

There was, however, an earlier, indirect connection between us. George Swiebel’s father, old Myron, knew Gaylord Koffritz, Renata’s ex-husband. These two had had an unusual encounter in the Russian Bath on Division Street. George had told me about it.

He was a simple modest person, George’s father. All he wanted was to live forever. George came by his vitalism directly. He got it from Myron who had it in a more primitive form. Myron declared that he owed his longevity to heat and vapor, to black bread raw onion bourbon whisky herring sausage cards billiards race horses and women.

Now in the steam room with its wooden bleachers and its sizzling boulders and buckets of ice water the visual distortion was considerable. From the rear if you saw a slight figure with small buttocks you thought it to be a child, but there were no children here and from the front you discovered a rosy and shrunken old man. Father Swiebel, clean-shaven and seen from the back just like a little boy, met a bearded man in the steam and because of the glittering beard took him to be much older. He was however only in his thirties, and very well built. They sat down together on the wooden trestles, two bodies covered with drops of moisture, and Father Swiebel said, “What do you do?”

The bearded man was unwilling to say what he did. Father Swiebel urged him to talk. This was wrong. It was, in the demented jargon of the educated, against the “ethos” of the place. Here, as at the Downtown Club, business was not discussed. George liked to say that the steam bath was like the last refuge in the burning forest where hostile animals observed a truce and the law of fang and claw was suspended. I’m afraid he got this from Walt Disney. The point he wanted to remind me of was that it was wrong to ply your trade or make a pitch while steaming. Father Swiebel was to blame and admitted it. “This fellow with the hair didn’t want to talk. I egged him on. So then he let me have it.”

Where men are as nude as the troglodytes of Stone Age Adriatic caverns and sit together dripping and red, like sunset in a mist, and, as in this case, one has a full brown sparkling beard, and eyes are meeting eyes through streaming sweat and vapor, strange things are apt to be spoken. It turned out that the stranger was a salesman whose line was crypts tombs and mausoleums. When Father Swiebel heard this he wanted to back off. But now it was too late. With arched brows, with white teeth and living lips within the dense fell of the beard, the man spoke:

Has your last rest been arranged? Is there a family plot? Are you provided? No? But why not? Can you afford such neglect? Do you know how they will bury you? Amazing! Has anybody talked to you about conditions in the new cemeteries? Why, they’re nothing but slums. Death deserves dignity. Out there the exploitation is terrible. It’s one of the biggest real-estate swindles going. They cheat you. They don’t give the statutory number of feet. You have