by Bellow, Saul
As she told Ms. Wong, she had seen a book many years ago in the stacks of the Columbia library. A single title had detached itself from the rest, from thousands: The Human Pair._ Well, the big-boned blond student doing research_ and feeling (unaware) so volcanic that one of her controls was to hold her breath—at the sight of those gilded words on the spine of a book was able to breathe again. She breathed. She didn’t take the book down; she didn’t want to read it. “I wanted not to_ read it.”
She described this to Laura Wong, who was too polite to limit her, too discreet to direct her confidences into suitable channels. You had to listen to everything that came out of Clara’s wild head when she was turned on. Ms. Wong applied these personal revelations to her own experience of life, as anybody else would have done. She had been married too. Five years an American wife. Maybe she had even been in love. She never said. You’d never know.
“The full title was The Human Pair in the Novels of Thomas Hardy._ At school I loved Hardy, but now all I wanted of that book was the title. It came back to me at Cortina. Ithiel and I were the Human Pair. We took a picnic lunch up to the forest behind the Cristallo—cheese, bread, cold cuts, pickles, and wine. I rolled on top of Ithiel and fed him. Later I found out when I tried it myself how hard it is to swallow in that position.
“I now feel, looking back, that I was carrying too much of an electrical charge. It’s conceivable that the world-spirit gets into mere girls and makes them its demon interpreters. I mentioned this to Ithiel a while back—he and I are old enough now to discuss such subjects—and he said that one of his Russian dissident pals had been talking to him about something called ‘superliterature’—literature being the tragedy or comedy of private lives, while superliterature was about the possible end of the world. Beyond personal history. In Cortina I thought I was acting from personal emotions, but those emotions were so devouring, fervid, that they may have been suprapersonal—a wholesome young woman in love expressing the tragedy or comedy of the world concluding. A fever using love as its carrier.
“After the holiday we drove down to Milan. Actually, that’s where I met Spontini. We were at a fancy after-dinner party, and he said, ‘Let me give you a ride back to your hotel.’ So Ithiel and I got into his Jaguar with him, and we were escorted by carloads of cops, fore and aft. He was proud of his security; this was when the Red Brigades were kidnapping the rich. It wasn’t so easy_ to be rich—rich enough for ransom. Mike said, ‘For all I know, my own friend Giangiacomo may have a plan to abduct me. Not Giangiacomo personally but the outfit he belongs to.’
“On that same trip Ithiel and I also spent some time with Giangiacomo the billionaire revolutionist himself. He was a kind, pleasant man, good-looking except for his preposterous Fidel Castro getup, like a little kid from Queens in a cowboy suit. He wore a forage cap, and in a corner of his fancy office there was a machine gun on the floor. He invited Ithiel and me to his chтteau, about eighty kilometers away, eighteenth-century rococo: it might have been a set for The Marriage of Figaro,_ except for the swimming pool with algae in it and a sauna alongside, in the dank part of the garden far down the hill. At lunch, the butler was leaning over with truffles from Giangiacomo’s own estate to grate over the _creme veloutщe,__ and he couldn’t because Giangiacomo was waving his arms, going on about revolutionary insurgency, the subject of the book he was writing. Then, when Ithiel told him that there were no views like his in Karl Marx, Giangiacomo said, ‘I never read Marx, and it’s too late now to do it; it’s urgent to act.’ He drove us back to Milan in the afternoon at about five hundred miles an hour. Lots of action, let me tell you. I covered my emerald and gripped it with my right hand, to protect it, maybe, in a crash.
“Next day, when we flew out, Giangiacomo was at the airport in battle dress with a group of boutique girls, all in minis. A year or two later he blew himself up while trying to dynamite power lines. I was sad about it.”
When they returned to New York in stuffy August, back to the apartment in Chelsea, Clara cooked Ithiel a fine Italian dinner of veal with lemon and capers, as good as, or better than, the Milan restaurants served, or Giangiacomo’s chef at the lovely toy chтteau. At work in the narrow New York galley-style kitchen, Clara was naked and wore clogs. To make it tender, she banged the meat with a red cast-iron skillet. In those days she wore her hair long. Whether she was dressed or nude, her movements always were energetic; she didn’t know the meaning of slow-time.
Stretched on the bed, Ithiel studied his dangerous documents (all those forbidden facts) while she cooked and the music played; the shades were down, the lights were on, and they enjoyed a wonderful privacy. “When I was a kid and we went on holidays to the Jersey coast during the war,” Clara recalled, “we had black window blinds because of the German submarines hiding out there under the Atlantic, but we could play our radios as loud as we wanted.” She liked to fancy that she was concealing Ithiel and his secret documents—not that the deadly information affected Ithiel enough to change the expression of his straight profile: “concentrating like Jascha Heifetz.” Could anybody have been tailing him? Guys with zoom lenses or telescopic sights on the Chelsea rooftops?
Ithiel smiled, and pooh-poohed this. He wasn’t that important. “I’m not rich like Spontini.” They might rather be trained on Clara, zeroing in on a Daughter of Albion without a stitch on, he said.
In those days he came frequently from Washington to visit his young son, who lived with his mother on East Tenth Street. Ithiel’s ex-wife, who now used her maiden name, Etta Wolfenstein, went out of her way to be friendly to Clara, chatted her up on the telephone. Etta had informants in Washington, who kept an eye on Ithiel. Ithiel was indifferent to gossip. “I’m not the president,” he would say to Clara, “that bulletins should go out about my moods and movements.”
“I shouldn’t have blamed Ithiel for taking a woman out to dinner now and then in Washington. He needed plain, ordinary quiet times. I turned on so much power in those days. Especially after midnight, my favorite time to examine my psyche—what love was; and death; and hell and eternal punishment; and what Ithiel was going to cost me in the judgment of God when I closed my eyes on this world forever. All my revivalist emotions came out after one A. M., whole nights of tears, anguish and hysteria. I drove him out of his head. To put a stop to this, he’d have to marry me. Then he’d never again have to worry. All my demon power would be at his service. But meanwhile if he got an hour’s sleep toward morning and time enough to shave before his first appointment, he’d swallow his coffee, saying that he looked like Lazarus in his shroud. He was vain of his good looks too,” said Clara to Ms. Wong. “Maybe that’s why I chose that kind of punishment, to put rings under his eyes. Once he said that he had to outline a piece of legislation for the Fiat people—they were trying to get a bill passed in Congress—and they’d think he’d spent the night at an orgy and now couldn’t get his act together.”
Clara wasn’t about to tell Teddy that in Milan when Mike Spontini had invited her to sit in front with him, she had found the palm of his hand waiting for her on the seat, and she had lifted herself up immediately and given him her evening bag to hold. In the dark his fingers soon closed on her thigh. Then she pushed in the cigarette lighter and he guessed what she would do with it when the coil was hot, so he stopped, he let her be. You didn’t mention such incidents to the man you were with. It was anyway commonplace stuff to a man who thought world politics continually.
In the accounts heard by Ms. Wong (who had so much American sensitivity, despite her air of Oriental distance and the Chinese cut of her clothes), Clara’s frankness may have made her_ seem foreign. Clara went beyond the conventions of American openness. The emerald ring appeased her for a time, but Ithiel was not inclined to move forward, and Clara became more difficult. She told him she had decided that they would be buried in the same grave. She said, “I’d rather go into the ground with the man I loved than share a bed with somebody indifferent. Yes, I think we should be in the
same coffin. Or two coffins, but the one who dies last will be on the top. Side by side is also possible. Holding hands, if that could be arranged.” Another frequent topic was the sex and the name of their first child. An Old Testament name was what she preferred—Zebulon or Gad or Asher or Naftali. For a girl, Michal, perhaps, or Naomi. He vetoed Michal because she had mocked David for his naked victory dance, and then he refused to take part in such talk at all. He didn’t want to make any happy plans. He was glum with her when she said that there was a lovely country cemetery back in Indiana with big horse chestnuts all around.
When he went off to South America on business, she learned from Etta Wolfenstein that he had taken a Washington secretary with him for assistance and (knowing Teddy) everything else. To show him what was what, Clara had an affair with a young Jean-Claude just over from Paris, and within a week he was sharing her apartment. He was very good-looking, but he seldom washed. His dirt was so ingrained that she couldn’t get him clean in the shower stall. She had to take a room at the Plaza to force him into the tub. Then for a while she could bear the smell of him. He appealed to her to help get a work permit, and she took him to Steinsalz, Ithiel’s lawyer. Later Jean-Claude refused to return her house key, and she had to go to Steinsalz again. “Have your lock changed, dear girl,” said Steinsalz, and he asked whether she wanted Ithiel billed for these consultations. He was a friend and admired Ithiel.
“But Ithiel told me you never charged him for your services.”
Clara had discovered how amused New Yorkers were by her ignorance.
“Since you took up with this Frenchie, have you missed anything around the house?”
She seemed slow to understand, but that was simply a put-on. She had locked the emerald ring in her deposit box (this, too, an act suggestive of burial).
She said firmly, “Jean-Claude is no bum.”
Steinsalz liked Clara too, for her passionate character. Somehow he knew, also, that her family had money—a realestate fortune, and this gained her a certain consideration with him. Jean-Claude was not the Steinsalz type. He advised Clara to patch up her differences with Ithiel. “Not to use sex for spite,” he said. Clara could not help but look at the lawyer’s lap, where because he was obese his sex organ was outlined by the pressure of his fat. It made her think of one of those objects that appeared when art lovers on their knees made rubbings on a church floor. The figure of a knight dead for centuries.
“Then why can’t Ithiel stay faithful?”
Steinsalz’s first name was Bobby. He was a great economist. He ran a million-dollar practice, and it cost him not a cent. He sublet a corner office space from a flashy accountant and paid him in legal advice.
Steinsalz said, “Teddy is a genius. If he didn’t prefer to hang loose, he could name his position in Washington. He values his freedom, so that when he wanted to visit Mr. Leakey in the Olduvai Gorge, he just picked up and went. He thinks no more about going to Iran than I do about Coney Island. The shah likes to talk to him. He sent for him once just to be briefed on Kissinger. I tell you this, Clara, so that you won’t hold Ithiel on too short a leash. He truly appreciates you, but he irks easy. A little consideration of his needs would fill him with gratitude. A good idea is not to get too clamorous around him. Let me tell you, there are curators in the zoo who give more thought to the needs of a fruit bat than any of us give our fellowman.”
Clara answered him, “There are animals who come in pairs. So suppose the female pines?”
That was a good talk, and Clara remembered Steinsalz gratefully.
“Everybody knows how to advise lovers,” said Steinsalz. “But only the lovers can say what’s what.”
A bookish bachelor, he lived with his eighty-year-old mother, who had to be taken to the toilet in her wheelchair. He liked to list the famous men he had gone to high school with—Holz the philosopher, Buchman the Nobel physicist, Lashover the crystallographer. “And yours truly, whose appellate briefs have made legal history.”
Clara said, “I sort of loved old Steinsalz too. He was like a Santa Claus with an empty sack who comes down your chimney to steal everything in the house—that’s one of Ithiel’s wisecracks, about Steinsalz and property. In his own off-the-wall way, Steinsalz was generous.”
Clara took advice from the lawyer and made peace with Ithiel on his return. Then the same mistakes overtook them. “I was a damn recidivist. When Jean-Claude left I was glad of it. Getting into the tub with him at the Plaza was a kind of frolic—a private camp event. They say the Sun King stank. If so, Jean-Claude could have gone straight to the top of Versailles. But my family are cleanliness freaks. Before she would sit in your car, my granny would force you to whisk-broom the seat, under the floor mat too, to make sure her serge wouldn’t pick up any dust.” By the way, Clara locked up the ring not for fear that Jean-Claude would steal it but to protect it from contamination by her wrongful behavior in bed.
But when Ithiel came back, his relations with Clara were not what they had been. Two outside parties had come between them, even though Ithiel seemed indifferent to Jean-Claude. Jealous and hurt, Clara could not forgive the little twit from Washington, of whom Etta Wolfenstein had given her a full picture. That girl was stupid but had very big boobs. When Ithiel talked about his mission to Betancourt in Venezuela, Clara was unimpressed. An American woman in love was far more important than any South American hotshot. “And did you take your little helper along to the president’s palace to show off her chest development?”
Ithiel sensibly said, “Let’s not beat on each other too much,” and Clara repented and agreed. But soon she set up another obstacle course of tests and rules, and asserted herself unreasonably. When Ithiel had his hair cut, Clara said, “That’s not the way I like it, but then I’m not the one you’re pleasing.” She’d say, “You’re grooming yourself more than you used to. I’m sure Jascha Heifetz doesn’t take such care of his hands.” She made mistakes. You didn’t send a man with eyes from Greek mythology to the bathroom to cut his fingernails, even if you did have a horror of clippings on the carpet—she’d forget that she and Ithiel were the Human Pair.
But at the time she couldn’t be sure that Ithiel was thinking as she did about “Human. ” To sound him out, she assumed a greater interest in politics and got him to talk about Africa, China, and Russia. What emerged was the insignificance of the personal factor. Clara repeated and tried out words like Kremlin or Lubyanka in her mind (they sounded like the living end) while she heard Ithiel tell of people who couldn’t explain why they were in prison, never rid of lice and bedbugs, never free from dysentery and TB, and finally hallucinating. They make an example of them, she thought, to show that nobody is anybody, everybody is expendable. And even here, when Ithiel was pushed to say it, he admitted that here in the U. S., the status of the individual was weakening and probably in irreversible decline. Felons getting special consideration was a sign of it. He could be remote about such judgments, as if his soul were one of a dozen similar souls in a jury box, hearing evidence: to find us innocent would be nice, but guilty couldn’t shock him much. She concluded that he was in a dangerous moral state and that it was up to her to rescue him from it. The Human Pair was also a rescue operation.
“A terrible crisis threatened to pinch us both to death.”
At the time, she was not advanced enough to think this to a conclusion. Later she would have known how to put it: You couldn’t separate love from being. You could Be, even though you were alone. But in that case, you loved only yourself. If so, everybody else was a phantom, and then world politics was a shadow play. Therefore she, Clara, was the only key to politics that Ithiel was likely to find. Otherwise he might as well stop bothering his head about his grotesque game theories, ideology, treaties, and the rest of it. Why bother to line up so many phantoms?
But this was not a time for things to go well. He missed the point, although it was as big as a boulder to her. They had bad arguments—“It was a mistake not to let him sleep”—and
after a few oppressive months, he made plans to leave the country with yet another of his outlandish lady friends.
Clara heard, again from Etta Wolfenstein, that Ithiel was staying in a fleabag hotel in the Forties west of Broadway, where he’d be hard to find. ” ‘Safety in sleaze,’ Etta said—_She__ was a piece of work.” He was to meet the new girlfriend at Kennedy next afternoon.
At once Clara went uptown in a cab and walked into the cramped lobby, dirty tile like a public lavatory. She pressed with both hands on the desk and lied that she was Ithiel s wife, saying that he had sent her to check him out and take his luggage. “They believed me. You’re never so cool as when you’re burned up completely. They didn’t even ask for identification, since I paid cash and tipped everybody five bucks apiece. When I went upstairs I was astonished that he could bring himself to sit down on such a bed, much less sleep in those grungy sheets. The morgue would have been nicer.”
Then she returned to her apartment with his suitcase—the one they took to Cortina, where she had been so happy. She waited until after dark, and he turned up at about seven o’clock. Cool with her, which meant that he was boiling.
“Where do you get off, pulling this on me?”
“You didn’t say you were coming to New York. You were sneaking out of the country.”
“Since when do I have to punch the clock in and out like an employee!”
She stood up to him without fear. In fact she was desperate. She shouted at him the Old Testament names of their unborn children. “You’re betraying Michal and Naomi.”
As a rule, Ithiel was self-possessed to an unusual degree, “unless we were making love. It was cold anger at first,” as Clara was to tell it. “He spoke like a man in a three-piece suit. I reminded him that the destiny of both our races depended on those children. I said they were supposed to be a merger of two high types. I’m not against other types, but they’d be there anyway, and more numerous—I’m no racist.”