by Bellow, Saul
Katrina thought him mysterious-looking, too. Beneath the bill of the Greek or Lenin-style cap there was a sort of millipede tangle about the eyes. His eyes were long, extending curiously into the temples. His cheeks were as red in sickness as in health; he was almost never pale. He carried himself with admirable, nonposturing, tilted grace, big but without heaviness. Not a bulky figure. He had style. You could, if you liked, call him an old bohemian, but such classifications did not take you far. No category could hold Victor.
The traveling-celebrity bit was very tiring. You flew in and you were met at the airport by people you didn’t know and who put you under a strain because they wanted to be memorable individually, catch your attention, ingratiate themselves, provoke, flatter—it all came to the same thing. Driving from the airport, you were locked in a car with them for nearly an hour. Then there were drinks—a cocktail hubbub. After four or five martinis you went in to dinner and were seated between two women, not always attractive. You had to remember their names, make conversation, give them equal time. You might as well be running for office, you had to shake so many hands. You ate your prime rib and drank wine, and before you had unfolded your speech on the lectern, you were already tuckered out. You shouldn’t fight all this, said Victor; to fight it only tired you more. But normally Victor thrived on noise, drink, and the conversation of strangers. He had so much to say that he overwhelmed everybody who approached him. In the full blast of a cocktail party he was able to hear everything and to make himself heard; his tenor voice was positively fifelike when he made an important point, and he was superarticulate.
If after his lecture a good discussion developed, he’d be up half the night drinking and talking. That was what he loved, and to be abed before midnight was a defeat. So he was either uncharacteristically fatigued or the evening had been a drag. Stupid things must have been said to him. And here he was, a man who had associated with Andrщ Breton, Duchamp, the stars of his generation, weary to the bone, in frozen Buffalo (you could picture Niagara Falls more than half iced over), checking in with a girlfriend in Evanston, Illinois. Add to the list of bad circumstances his detestation of empty hours in hotel rooms. Add also that he had probably taken off his pants, as she had seen him do in this mood, and thrown them at the wall, plus his big shoes, and his shirt made into a ball. He had his dudgeons, especially when there hadn’t been a single sign of intelligence or entertainment. Now for comfort (or was it out of irritation) he telephoned Katrina. Most likely he had had a couple of drinks, lying naked, passing his hand over the hair of his chest, which sometimes seemed to soothe him. Except for his socks, he would then resemble the old men that Picasso had put into his late erotic engravings. Victor himself had written about the painter-and-model series done at Mougins in 1968, ferocious scribbles of satyr artists and wide-open odalisques. Through peepholes aged wrinkled kings spied on gigantic copulations. (Victor was by turns the painter-partner and the aged king.) Katrina’s pretty lopsidedness might have suited Picasso’s taste. (Victor, by the way, was no great admirer of Picasso.)
“So Buffalo wasn’t a success?”
“Buffalo! Hell, I can’t see any reason why it exists.”
“But you said you had to stop to see Vanessa.”
“That’s another ordeal I can do without. We’re having breakfast at seven.”
“And your lecture?”
“I read them my paper on Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire._ I thought, for a university crowd…”
“Well, tomorrow will be more important, more interesting,” said Katrina.
Victor had been invited to address the Executives Association, an organization of bankers, economists, former presidential advisers, National Security Council types. Victor assured her that this was a far more important outfit than the overpublicized Trilateral Commission, which, he said, was a front organization using ex-presidents and other exploded stars to divert attention from real operations. The guys who were bringing him to Chicago wanted him to talk about “Culture and Politics, East and West.” Much they cared about art and culture, said Victor. But they sensed that it had to be dealt with; challenging powers were ascribed to it, nothing immediate or worrisome, but one ought to know what intellectuals were up to. “They’ve listened to professors and other pseudoexperts,” said Victor, “and maybe they believe they should send for an old Jewish character. Pay him his price and he’ll tell you without fakery what it’s all about.” The power of big-shot executives wouldn’t overawe him. Those people, he said, were made of Styrofoam. He was gratified nevertheless. They had asked for the best, and that was himself—a realistic judgment, and virtually free from vanity. Katrina estimated that he would pick up a ten-thousand-dollar fee. “I don’t expect the kind of dough that Kissinger gets, or Haig, although I’ll give better value,” he told her. He didn’t mention a figure, though. Dotey, no bad observer, said that he’d talk freely about anything in the world but money—his_ money.
Dotey’s observations, however, were commonplace. She spoke with what Katrina had learned to call ressentiment_—from behind a screen of grievances. What could a person like Dotey understand about a man like Victor, whom she called “that gimpy giant”? What if this giant should have been in his time one of the handsomest men ever made? What if he should still have exquisite toes and fingers; a silken scrotum that he might even now (as he held the phone) be touching, leading out the longest hairs—his unconscious habit when he lay in bed? What, moreover, if he should be a mine of knowledge, a treasury of insights in all matters concerning the real needs and interests of modern human beings? Could a Dorothea evaluate the release_ offered to a woman by such an extraordinary person, the independence? Could she feel what it meant to be free from so much, junk?_
“By the way, Victor,” said Katrina. “Do you remember the notes you dictated over the phone for use, maybe, tomorrow? I typed them up for you. If you need them, I’ll have them with me when I meet you at O’Hare in the morning.”
“I’ve had a different thought,” said Victor. “How would it be if you were to fly here?”
“Me? Fly to Buffalo?”
‘That’s right. You join me, and we’ll go on to Chicago together.”
Immediately all of Katrina’s warmest expectations were reversed, and up from the bottom there seeped instead every kind of dreariness imaginable. While Victor was in the air in the morning, she wouldn’t be preparing, treating herself to a long bath, then putting on her pine-green knitted Vivanti suit and applying the Cabochard, his favorite perfume. She would be up until two A. M., improvising, trying to make arrangements, canceling her appointment downtown, setting her clock for five A. M. She hated to get up while it was still night.
There must be a sensible explanation for this, but Katrina couldn’t bring herself to ask what it was—like “What’s wrong? Are you sick?” She had unbearable questions to put to herself, too: Will I have to take him to the hospital?… Why me? His daughter is there. Does he need emergency surgery? Back to all the horrible stuff that had happened at Mass. General? A love that began with passionate embraces ending with barium X rays, heavy drugs, bad smells? The grim wife coming back to take control?
Don’t go so fast, Katrina checked herself. She regrouped and reentered her feelings at a different place. He was completely by himself and was afraid that he might start to crumble in his plane seat: a man like Victor, who was as close to being a prince as you could be (in what he described as “this bungled age”), such a man having to telephone a girl—and to Victor, when you came right down to it, she was a_ girl, one of many (although she was pretty sure she had beaten the rest of the field). He had to appeal to a girl (“I’ve had a different thought”) and expose his weakness to her.
What was necessary now was to speak as usual, so that when he said, “I had the travel desk make a reservation for you, if you want to use it—are you there?” she answered, “Let me find a pen that writes.” A perfectly good pen hung on a string. What she needed was to collect herself while
she thought of an alternative. She wasn’t clever enough to come up with anything, so she began to print out the numbers he gave her. Heavyhearted? Of course she was. She was forced to consider her position from a “worst case” point of view. A North Shore mother of two, in a bad, a deteriorating marriage, had begun to be available sexually to visitors. Selectively. It was true that a couple of wild mistakes had occurred. But then a godsend, Victor, turned up.
In long discussions with her analyst (whom she no longer needed), she had learned how central her father was in all this, in the formation or deformation of her character. Until she was ten years old she had known nothing but kindness from her daddy. Then, with the first hints of puberty, her troubles began. Exasperated with her, he said she was putting on a guinea-pig look. He called her a con artist. She was doing the farmer’s-daughter-traveling-salesman bit. “That puzzled expression, as if you can’t remember whether a dozen is eleven or thirteen. And what do you suppose happens with the thirteenth egg, hey? Pretty soon you’ll let a stranger lead you into the broom closet and take off your panties.” Well! Thank you, Daddy, for all the suggestions you planted in a child’s mind. Predictably she began to be sly and steal pleasure, and she did play the farmer’s daughter, adapting and modifying until she became the mature Katrina. In the end (a blessed miracle) it worked out for the best, for the result was just what had attracted Victor—an avant-garde personality who happened to be crazy about just this erotic mixture. Petty bourgeois sexuality, and retrograde petty bourgeois at that, happened to turn Victor on. So here was this suburban broad, the clichщ of her father’s loaded forebodings: call her what you liked—voluptuary, luxurious beauty, confused sexpot, carnal idiot with piano legs, her looks (mouth half open or half shut) meaning everything or nothing. Just this grace-in-clumsiness was the aphrodisiac of one of the intellectual captains of the modern world. She dismissed the suggestion (Dotey’s suggestion) that it was his decline that had brought her into his life, that she appeared when he was old, failing, in a state of desperation or erotic bondage. And it was true that any day now the earth would open underfoot and he’d be gone.
Meanwhile, if he wasn’t so powerful as he once had been (as if some dust had settled on his surface), he was powerful still. His color was fresh and his hair vigorous. Now and then for an instant he might look pinched, but when he sat with a drink in his hand, talking away, his voice was so strong and his opinions so confident that it was inconceivable that he should ever disappear. The way she sometimes put it to herself was he was more than her lover. He was also retraining her. She had been admitted to his master class. Nobody else was getting such instruction.
“I’ve got all the numbers now.”
“You’ll have to catch the eight o’clock flight.”
“I’ll park at the Orrington, because while I’m gone for the day I don’t want the car sitting in front of the house.”
“Okay. And you’ll find me in the VIP lounge. There should be time for a drink before we catch the one P. M. flight.”
“Just as long as I’m back by midafternoon. And I can bring the notes you dictated.”
“Well,” said Victor, “I could have_ told you they were indispensable.” i see.
“I ask you to meet me, and it sounds like an Oriental proposition, as if the Sultan were telling his concubine to come out beyond the city walls with the elephants and the musicians….”
“How nice that you should mention elephants,” said Katrina, alert at once.
“Whereas it’s just Chicago-Buffalo-Chicago.”
That he should refer by a single word to her elephant puzzle, her poor attempt to do something on an elephant theme, was an unusual concession. She had stopped mentioning it because it made Victor go crosseyed with good-humored boredom. But now he had dropped a hint that ordering her to fly to Buffalo was just as tedious, just as bad art, as her floundering attempt to be creative with an elephant.
Katrina pushed this no further. She said, “I wish I could attend your talk tomorrow. I’d love to hear what you’ll say to those executives.”
“Completely unnecessary,” Victor said. “You hear better things from me in bed than I’ll ever say to those guys.”
He did say remarkable things during their hours of high intimacy. God only knows how much intelligence he credited her with. But he was a talker, he had_ to talk, and during those wide-ranging bed conversations (monologues) when he let himself go, he didn’t stop to explain himself; it was blind trust, it was faute de mieux, that made him confide in her. As he went on, he was more salty, scandalous, he was murderous. Reputations were destroyed when he got going, and people torn to bits. So-and-so was a plagiarist who didn’t know what to steal; X who was a philosopher was a chorus boy at heart; Y had a mind like a lazy Susan—six spoiled appetizers and no main course. Abed, Victor and Katrina smoked, drank, touched each other (tenderness from complicity), laughed; they thought_—my God, they thought! Victor carried her into utterly foreign spheres of speculation. He lived for ideas. And he didn’t count on Katrina’s comprehension; he couldn’t. Incomprehension darkened his life sadly. But it was a fixed condition, a given. And when he was wicked she understood him well enough. He wasn’t wasting his wit on her, as when he said about Fonstine, a rival who tried to do him in, “He runs a Procrustean flophouse for bum ideas”; Katrina made notes later, and prayed that she was being accurate. So as usual Victor had it right—she did hear better things in bed than he could possibly say in public. When he took an entire afternoon off for such recreation, he gave himself over to it entirely—he was a daylong deep loller. When on the other hand he sat down to his papers, he was a daylong worker, and she didn’t exist for him. Nobody did.
Arrangements for tomorrow having been made, he was ready to hang up. “You’ll have to phone around to clear the decks,” he said. “The TV shows nasty weather around Chicago.”
“Yes, Krieggstein drove into a snowdrift.”
“Didn’t you say you were having him to dinner? Is he still there? Let him make himself useful.”
“Like what?”
“Like walking the dog. There’s a chore he can spare you.”
“Oh, he’ll volunteer to do that. Well, good night, then. And we’ll have a wingding when you get here.”
Hanging up, she wondered whether she hadn’t said “wingding” too loudly (Krieggstein) and also whether Victor might not be put off by such dated words, sorority sex slang going back to the sixties. Hints from the past wouldn’t faze him—what did he care about her college sex life? But he was unnervingly fastidious about language. As others were turned off by grossness, he was sensitive to bad style. She got into trouble in San Francisco when she insisted that he see _M*ASH.__ “I’ve been to it, Vic. You mustn’t miss this picture.” Afterward, he could hardly bear to talk to her, an unforgettable disgrace. Eventually she made it up with him, after long days of coolness. Her conclusion was, “I can’t afford to be like the rest.”
Now back to Krieggstein: how different a corner within the human edifice Krieggstein occupied. “So you have to go out of town,” he said. At the fireside, somber and solid, he was giving his fullest attention to her problem. She often suspected that he might be an out-and-out kook. If he was_ a kook, how had he become her great friend? Well, there was a position to fill and nobody else to fill it with. And he was, remember, a true war hero. It was no easy matter to figure out who or what Sammy Krieggstein really was. Short, broad, bald, rugged, he apparently belonged to the police force. Sometimes he said he was on the vice squad, and sometimes homicide or narcotics; and now and then he wouldn’t say at all, as if his work were top-secret, superclassified. “This much I’ll tell you, dear—there are times on the street when I could use the good old flamethrower. ” He had boxed in the Golden Gloves tournament, way back before the Pacific war, and had scar tissue on his face to prove it. Still earlier he had been a street fighter. He made himself out to be very tough—a terrifying person who was also a gentleman and a tender friend.
The first time she invited him for a drink he asked for a cup of tea, but he laid out all his guns on the tea table. Under his arm he carried a Magnum, in his belt was stuck a flat small gun, and he had another pistol strapped to his leg. He had entertained the little girls with these weapons. Perfectly safe, he said. “Why should we give the whole weapon monopoly to the wild element on the streets?” He told Katrina when he took her to Le Perroquet about stabbings and disembowelments, car chases and shoot-outs. When a bruiser in a bar recently took him for a poor schnook, he showed him one of the guns and said, “All right, pal, how would you like a second asshole right between your eyes. ” Drawing a theoretical conclusion from this anecdote, Krieggstein said to Katrina, “You people”—his interpretations were directed mainly at Victor—“ought to have a better idea than you do of how savage it is out there. When Mr. Wulpy wrote about The House of the Dead,_ he referred to absolute criminals. ‘ In America we are now far out on a worse track. A hundred years ago Russia was still a religious country. We haven’t got the saints that are supposed to go with the sinners… . ” The Lieutenant valued his acquaintance with the famous man. He himself, in his sixties, was working on a Ph. D. in criminology. On any topic of general interest Krieggstein was prepared to take a position immediately.