Boswell by Stanley Elkin Page B

listened when I told him about the two dollars? Penner was a rat. As soon as he was gone I would pee, and then I would come back and steal his eggs.
    “Will you be coming to the gym tonight?” I asked.
    “Idon’t know,” he said. “I’ve got to get out now.”
    “Goodbye.”
    He closed the door without answering and I heard him go down the hall.
    When I came back from the bathroom I looked around for Penner’s eggs. I couldn’t find them anywhere and decided that I would make some coffee. Inside the coffee can were three eggs. I broke them into the pan and scrambled them with Penner’s one spoon. It took a long time and I couldn’t wait. I ate the wet, loose eggs and then washed the pan and the spoon in warm water from Penner’s single faucet. Then I put on six cups of coffee and lay down on Penner’s bed to wait.
    I fell asleep and woke to the smell of strong, burning coffee. I drank about two cups and poured the rest down Penner’s one sink.
    Now I was through. There was nothing more for me to do. I looked for something to read, but all I could find were a Bible and last night’s newspaper. I read the Bible for about forty minutes but it only made me sleepy. I was still curious about Penner, of course, but there was nothing in the room that told me very much. It was true about the simplicity of his life. He wasn’t a getter either. He had only two shirts in his drawer, two pairs of slacks and a couple of ties in his closet. It was like a wardrobe one takes somewhere for the weekend. Why, I realized suddenly, that was what my wardrobe was like, too. Were Penner and I somehow alike? Had he spent himself down to this? Now I was very curious about Penner. I had been kidding around before. Now I went to the door and locked it. I turned back and looked suspiciously at everything—for letters, a diary, anything. There was nothing. I pulled back the blanket and investigated Penner’s sheets. In the closet I found his laundry bag. I took it out and emptied it on the floor. I stooped down and picked out his underwear and looked inside. I thought I heard someone coming and I shoved everything back into the bag and put it in the closet. Whoever it was came up to the door and shuffled around outside it for a few minutes and then turned and left. It was a light step, either a woman’s or a very small man’s. I wondered about it for a while, then went back to Penner’s bed, picked up the Bible once more and soon I was asleep again.
    Sometime in the middle of the afternoon I opened my eyes. I was laying on the bed like an ox, the radiator bubbling and hissing in the overheated room. I turned on my side and scraped against the Bible. I moved my feet off the bed and pushed myself upright with my arm. My feet were so heavy I couldn’t move them from their position on the floor. I had the impression they would grow there, rooting downward through the thin flooring, spreading outward toward the walls, through them. I felt massively doughy, unconsolidated. Probably it was time to go to the gym, but who needed it? It was absurd to exercise, to make myself larger than I already was. As I sat heaped like bedding on Penner’s mattress, it occurred to me that I was larger than anything in that room— perhaps larger than anything in that house. Certainly I was bigger than anything up in 4-L, but what did that mean? Four-L was a little room, practically unfurnished. I seemed almost architectural to myself, something in the landscape. Not a mountain or a building or even a tree— a bog, the weed row along a railroad track in summer.
    I was not meant for afternoons, I could see that. What had I been doing with my afternoons before I came here? There had been the gym, of course, and a couple of years in a junior college. I had filled my days, I suppose, as a careless man covers a wall with paint. There were great gaps.
    I stood up. It was a major effort. Like lifting a car. Penner’s room bored me. Penner bored me.
    When I