by Bellow, Saul
“Where are you anyway, Trina?” said Ysole.
“I had to attend a meeting in Schaumburg, and I’m stuck out here.”
“All right,” said Ysole. “Give me that suburban number where you’re at.” When Katrina made no answer, Ysole said, “You never would tell the truth if you could lie instead.”
Look at it this way: There was a howling winter space between them. The squat Negro woman with her low deformed hips who pressed the telephone to her ear, framed in white hair, was far shrewder than Katrina and was (with a black nose and brown mouth formed by nature for amusement) amused by her lies and antics. Katrina considered. Suppose that I told her, “I’m in a Detroit motel with Victor Wulpy. And right now he’s getting out of bed to go to the bathroom.” What use could such facts be to her? Ysole said, “Your friend the cop and your sister both checked in with me.”
“If I’m not home by five, when Lilburn comes, give him a drink, and have dinner there, too.”
“This is our regular night for bingo. We go to the church supper.”
“I’ll pay you fifty bucks, which is more than you can win at the church.” Ysole said no.
Katrina again felt: Everybody has power over me. Alfred, punishing me, the judge, the lawyers, the psychiatrist, Dotey—even the kids. They all apply standards nobody has any use for, except to stick you with. That’s what drew me to Victor, that he wouldn’t let anybody set conditions for him. Let others make the concessions. That’s how I’d like to be. Except that I haven’t got his kind of ego, which is a whole mountain of ego. Now it’s Ysole’s turn. “Are you holding me up, Ysole?” she said.
“Trina, I wouldn’t stay for five hundred. I had to fight Lilburn for this one night of the week. When do you figure to get home?”
“As fast as I can.”
“Well, the kids will be all right. I’ll lock the doors, and they can watch TV.” They hate us, said Trina to herself, after Ysole had hung up. They hate us terribly.
She needed Visine to ease the burning of her eyes. In the winter she was subject to eye inflammation. She thought it was because exhaust gases clung closer to the ground in zero weather and the winter air stank more. She opened her purse and sat on the edge of the bed raking through keys, compacts, paper tissues, dollar bills, credit cards, emery boards.
“You got nowhere with the telephone, I see,” said Victor. He was now standing above her, and he passed his hand through her hair. There was always some skepticism mixed with his tenderness when he approached her, as if he were sorry for her, sorry for all that she would never understand, that he would never do. Then he made a few distracted observations—unusual for him. Again he mentioned the air-conditioning unit. He couldn’t find the switch that turned it off. It reminded him of the machinery he had heard for the first time when he was etherized as a kid for surgery on his leg. Unconscious, he saw a full, brilliant moon. An old woman tried to climb over a bar—the diameter of this throbbing moon. If she had made it he would have died. “Those engines may have been my own heartbeats. Invisible machinery has affected me ever since. And you know how much invisible machinery there is in a place like this—all the jets, all the silicon-chip computers…. Now, Katrina, do something for me. Reach under my belt. Put your delicious hand down there. I need a touch from you. It’s one of the few things I can count on.”
She did it. It was not too much to ask of a woman of mature years. A matter between human friends. Signs of eagerness were always instantaneous. Never failing.
“What about a quickie, Trina?”
“But the phone will ring.”
“All the better, under pressure.”
“In these boots?”
“Just pull down your things.”
Victor lowered himself toward her. To all that was exposed he applied his cheeks, warmth to warmth, to her thighs, on her belly with its faint trail of hairs below the navel. The telephone was silent. It didn’t ring. They were winning, winning, winning, winning. They won!
That was what Victor said to her. “We got some of our own back.”
“We were due for one_ break,” said Katrina. “Dizzy luck. I’m spinning around.”
“Let’s stay put awhile. Don’t get up. There’s a Russian proverb: If late for an appointment, walk slower. We’re best off just as we are. Kinglake would have rung us if the plane weren’t on its way.”
“Do you think it’s after sundown, Victor?”
“How would we know from here? We’re on the inside of the inside of the inside. Why worry? You’ll be only a little late. They have to get me there. No Wulpy, no festival. It’s a test for them,_ a challenge they’ve accepted.”
They rested on the edge of the bed, legs hanging. He took Katrina’s hand, kissed her fingers. He was a masterful, cynical man, but with her at times like these he put aside his cynicism. She took it as a sign—how much he cared for her. He enjoyed talking when they lay together like this. She could recall many memorable things he had said on such occasions: “You could write better than Fonstine”—one of his enemies—“if you took off your shoes and pounded the keyboard with your rosy heels. Or just by lifting your skirts and sitting on the machine with your beautiful bottom. The results would be more inspiring.”
Victor now mentioned Wrangel. “He wanted to establish a relationship.”
“He has great respect—admiration for you,” said Katrina. “He said that to him when he came to the Village in the fifties—just a kid—you were in a class with Franklin D. Roosevelt. Meant to be a great man.”
“I was sure he would do lots of talking while I was on the telephone. Well, not to be modest about it, Katrina…” (And what was there to be modest about? They lay together at the foot of the bed, bare between the waist and the knees. His arm was still under her shoulders.) “In some respects I can see… I thought what I would do with power. It gave me an edge over intellectuals who never tried to imagine power. This was why they couldn’t think._ I have more iron in me. My ideas had more authority because I conceived what I would do in authority. It’s my nature….” He paused. “It was_ my nature. I’m going to have to part with my nature presently. All the more reason to increase the dispassionate view I always preferred.”
“Talking like this, just after sex?” said Katrina.
“I would have done well in a commanding situation. I have the temperamental qualifications. Don’t flinch from being a reprobate. Naturally political, and I have a natural contempt for people in private life who have no power-stir. Let it be in thought, let it be in painting. It has to be a powerful reading of the truth of existence. Metaphysical passion. You get as much truth as you have the courage to approach.”
Having nobody but me to tell this to. This was one of Katrina’s frequent thoughts—she was disappointed for his sake. If there had been a pad to the right of her she might have taken notes. She did have some_ idea what he was saying.
“Some of the sharpest pains we feel come from the silence imposed on the deepest inward mining that we do. The most unlikely-looking people may be the most deep miners. I’ve often thought, ‘He, or she, is intensely at work, digging in a different gallery, but the galleries are far apart, in parallels which never meet, and the diggers are deaf to one another’s work.’ It must be one of the wickedest forms of human suffering. And it could explain the horrible shapes often taken by what we call originality.’ “
“Was there nothing Wrangel said that had any value?”
“I might have been interested by his guru. I had a sense of secondhand views. I don’t think Wrangel had any hot news for me. If this is something like the end of time—for this civilization—everything already is quite clear and intelligible to alert minds. In our real_ thoughts, and I don’t mean what we say—what’s said is largely hokum—in the real thoughts, alert persons recognize what is happening. There may have been something in what Wrangel said—still echoing his guru—about the connections made by real thoughts: a true thought may have a true image corresponding to it. Do yo
u know why communication broke down with Wrangel? It was uncomfortable to hear a California parody of things that I had been thinking myself. I’ve been very troubled, Katrina. And the ideas I’ve developed over sixty years don’t seem to help me to cope with the trouble. I made an extreme commitment to lucidity….”
“But aren’t you lucid?”
“That’s my mental_ lucidity. I’ve been having lucid impressions—like dreams, visions—instead of lucid ideas.”
“What’s this about?”
“Well, there’s shared knowledge that we don’t talk about. That deaf deep mining.”
“Like what?”
“Cryptic persistent suggestions: the dead are not really dead._ Or, we don’t create thoughts, as that movie drip suggested. A thought is_ real, already created, and a real thought can pay you a visit. I think I understand why this happens to me. After so many years in the arts, you begin to assume that the value of life is bound up with the value of art. And there is no rational basis for this. Then you begin to suspect that it’s the ‘rational’ that lacks real meaning. Rationality would argue back that it’s the weakening of the organism that suggests this. A stupid argument.” Victor refrained from speaking of the erotic side of this—magical, aesthetic, erotic—or of what this final flare-up of eroticism might mean. It might mean that he was paying out from his last fibers for lucidity of impression and for sexual confirmation of the fact that he still existed. But full strength, strong fibers, only made you more capable of lying to yourself, of maintaining the mauvaise foi,_ the false description of your personal reality. He didn’t mention to Katrina the underground music which signified (had signified to Mark Antony) that the god Hercules was going away.
He changed the subject. He said to Katrina, “It’s a real laugh that Wrangel should mix me up in his mind with FDR.”
Roosevelt, too, was dying at a moment when to have strength was more necessary than ever. And hadn’t there been a woman with him at Warm Springs when he had his brain hemorrhage?
“Didn’t it ever occur to you?” said Katrina.
“It occurred, but I didn’t encourage the thought. Stalin made a complete fool of the man. Those trips to Teheran and Yalta must have been the death of him. They were ruinous physically. I’m certain that Stalin meant to hasten his death. Terrible journeys. Roosevelt felt challenged to demonstrate his vigor. Stalin didn’t budge. Roosevelt let himself be destroyed, proving his strength as chief of a great power, and also his ‘nobility.’ “
Katrina, who had moved her round face closer—a girl posing for a “sweetheart snapshot,” cheek to cheek—said, “Aren’t you cold? Wouldn’t you like me to pull the covers over you? No? At least slide your fingers under me to warm up.”
To encourage him she turned on her side. A gambit she could always count on—the smooth shape of her buttocks, their crшme de Chantilly whiteness. He always laughed when she offered herself this way, and put out his big, delicate hands. Something of a tough guy he really was, and particularly with age distortions—the wrecked Picasso Silenus reaching toward the nude beauty. She felt a sort of aristocratic delicacy from him even when he was manipulating these round forms of hers. It was really a bit crazy, the pride she took in her bottom. He matched up the freckles on each cheek—she had two prominent birthmarks—as if they were eyes. “Now you’re squinting. Now you’re crosseyed. Now you’re planning a conspiracy.” Victor paused and said, “This is what little Wrangel was saying about cartoons and abstractions, isn’t it? Making these faces?” Then he smoothed her gently and said, “It’s no figure of speech to say that your figure leaves me speechless.”
It was at this moment that the telephone began to ring, again and again—merciless. It was the desk. Their plane was just now landing. The limousine had started out. They were to be downstairs in five minutes.
They waited in the cold, under the bright lights. Victor had his stick and the mariner’s cap—the broad mustache, the wonderful face, the noble ease in all circumstances. The Thinker Prince. Never quite up to his great standard, she felt just a little clumsy beside him. She was in charge of the damned fiddle, too. To hold an instrument she couldn’t play. It turned her into a native bearer. She should set it on her head. And there they were on the edges of Detroit, standing on one of its crusts of light. Just like the other blasted cities of the northern constellation—Buffalo, Cleveland, Chicago, St. Louis—all those fields of ruin that looked so golden and beautiful by night.
“This_ is no limousine,” said Victor, irritated, when the car stopped. “It’s a goddamn compact Honda.”
But he made no further fuss about it. Opening the door of the car and taking a grip on the edge of the roof, he began to install himself in the front seat. First there was the stiff leg to get in, over on the driver’s end, by the brake, and then he eased in his head and his huge back so that, as he turned, the car was crammed to the top. Then he descended into the seat with patient, clever labor. It was like a difficult intromission. But as soon as he was in place, and while Katrina was settling herself in the back, he was already talking. Nerving himself for the approaching lecture, tuning up? “Did you ever get through the Cщline book I gave you?”
“The Journey?_ I did, finally.”
“It’s not agreeable, but it is important. It’s one of those French things I’ve had on my mind.”
“Like the Baudelaire?”
“Right.” The driver had taken off swiftly by a dark side road, along fences. Victor made an effort to turn in the small seat; he wanted to look at her. Apparently he wished to make a statement not only in words but also with his face. “Didn’t you think Cщline was truly terrifying? He uses the language that people everywhere really use. He expresses the ideas and feelings they really share.”
“Last time we spoke about it you said those were the ideas that made France collapse in 1940. And that the Germans also had those same ideas.”
“I don’t think that was exactly what I said. Talking about nihilism…”
Why had he asked her to read that book? Toward the end of it—a nightmare—a certain adventurer named Robinson refused to tell a woman that he loved her, and this “loving” woman, enraged, had shot him dead. Not even when she pointed the gun at him in the taxicab could she make him say the words “I love you.” The “loving” woman was really a maniac, while the man, the “lover,” although he was himself a crook, a deadbeat, a murderer, had one shred of honor left, and that, too, was in the terminal stage. Better dead than carried off for life by this loony ogress whom he would have to pretend to “love.” It wasn’t so much the book that had shocked Katrina—a book was only a book—but the fact that he, Victor, had told her to read it. Of course, he was always pushing the widest possible perspective of historical reality. The whole universe was his field of operations. A cosmopolitan in the fullest sense, a giant of comprehension, he was located in the central command post of comprehension. “Face the destructive facts. No palliatives,” was the kind ofthing he said.
“That book was next door to the murder camps,” she said.
“I don’t deny it.”
“Well, back at the hotel you said that alert people everywhere were recognizing the same facts. But same isn’t quite the way it was in the Cщline book. Not even for you, Victor.”
There was no time to answer. The car had stopped at the small private-aircraft building. When the driver ran from the front seat to open her door, she thought his face was distorted. Maybe it was only the cold that made him grimace. Extricating himself from the car, Victor again caught at the roof and hopped backward, drawing out the bad leg.
They entered the overilluminated shack. At the counter, where phones were jingling, Trina gave the name Wulpy to the dispatcher. The man said, “Yes, your Cessna is on the ground. It’ll taxi up in a few minutes.”
She passed the news to Victor, who nodded but went on talking. “I’ll grant you, the French had been had by their ideology. An ideology is a spell cast by the ruling class, a net o
f binding falsehoods, and the discovery of this can throw people into a rage. That’s why Cщline is violent.”
“People? Some_ people.”
You have a love affair and then you ask your ladylove to read a book to discredit love, and it’s the most extreme book you can select. That’s some valentine.
Her ostrich boots gave her no sense of elegance as she preceded him into the Cessna. She felt clumsy and thick, every graceless thing that a woman can be, and she carried Vanessa’s instrument across her chest. By the light of the lurid revolving bubble on the fuselage, she watched Victor being assisted into the plane. The two-man crew received Victor and Katrina with particular consideration. This was how the personnel were trained for these executive ferrying jobs.