by Bellow, Saul
There was nobody in the lab, either. Philip might have been taking a cup of coffee at the soda fountain in the drugstore below. It was possible also that he was passing the time with Marchek, the doctor with whom he shared the suite of offices. The connecting door was never locked, and I had occasionally sat in Marchek’s swivel chair with a gynecology book, studying the colored illustrations and storing up the Latin names.
Marchek’s starred glass pane was dark, and I assumed his office to be empty, but when I went in I saw a naked woman lying on the examining table. She wasn’t asleep; she seemed to be resting. Becoming aware that I was there, she stirred, and then without haste, disturbing herself as little as possible, she reached for her clothing heaped on Dr. Marchek’s desk. Picking out her slip, she put it on her belly—she didn’t spread it. Was she dazed, drugged? No, she simply took her sweet time about everything, she behaved with exciting lassitude. Wires connected her nice wrists to a piece of medical apparatus on a wheeled stand.
The right thing would have been to withdraw, but it was already too late for that. Besides, the woman gave no sign that she cared one way or another. She didn’t draw the slip over her breasts, she didn’t even bring her thighs together. The covering hairs were parted. These were salt, acid, dark, sweet odors. These were immediately effective; I was strongly excited. There was a gloss on her forehead, an exhausted look about the eyes. I believed that I had guessed what she had been doing, but then the room was half dark, and I preferred to avoid any definite thought. Doubt seemed much better, or equivocation.
I remembered that Philip, in his offhand, lazy way, had mentioned a “research project” going on next door. Dr. Marchek was measuring the reactions of partners in the sexual act. “He takes people from the street, he hooks them up and pretends he’s collecting graphs. This is for kicks; the science part is horseshit.”
The naked woman, then, was an experimental subject.
I had prepared myself to tell Philip about the dead girl on Ainslie Street, but the coffin, the kitchen, the ham, the flowers were as distant from me now as the ice floes on the lake and the killing cold of the water.
“Where did you come from?” the woman said to me.
“From next door—the dentist’s office.”
“The doctor was about to unstrap me, and I need to get loose. Maybe you can figure out these wires.”
If Marchek should be in the inner room, he wouldn’t come in now that he heard voices. As the woman raised both her arms so that I could undo the buckles, her breasts swayed, and when I bent over her the odor of her upper body made me think of the frilled brown papers in a box after the chocolates had been eaten—a sweet aftersmell and acrid cardboard mixed. Although I tried hard to stop it, my mother’s chest mutilated by cancer surgery passed through my mind. Its gnarled scar tissue. I also called in Stephanie’s closed eyes and kissing face—anything to spoil the attraction of this naked young woman. It occurred to me as I undid the clasps that instead of disconnecting her I was hooking myself. We were alone in the darkening office, and I wanted her to reach under the sheepskin and undo my belt for me.
But when her hands were free she wiped the jelly from her wrists and began to dress. She started with her bra, several times lowering her breasts into the cups, and when her arms went backward to fasten the hooks she bent far forward, as if she were passing under a low bough. The cells of my body were like bees, drunker and drunker on sexual honey (I expect that this will change the figure of Grandfather Louie, the old man remembered as this or that but never as a hive of erotic bees).
But I couldn’t be blind to the woman’s behavior even now. It was very broad; she laid it on. I saw her face in profile, and although it was turned downward, there was no mistaking her smile. To use an expression from the thirties, she was giving me the works. She knew I was about to fall on my face. She buttoned every small button with deliberate slowness, and her blouse had at least twenty such buttons, yet she was still bare from the waist down. Though we were so minor, she and I, a schoolboy and a floozy, we had such major instruments to play. And if we were to go further, whatever happened would never get beyond this room. It would be between the two of us, and nobody would ever hear of it. Still, Marchek, that pseudoexperimenter, was probably biding his time in the next room. An old family doctor, he must have been embarrassed and angry. And at any moment, moreover, my brother-in-law Philip might come back.
When the woman slipped down from the leather table she gripped her leg and said she had pulled a muscle. She lifted one heel onto a chair and rubbed her calf, swearing under her breath and looking everywhere with swimming eyes. And then, after she had put on her skirt and fastened her stockings to the garter belt, she pushed her feet into her pumps and limped around the chair, holding it by the arm. She said, “Will you please reach me my coat? Just put it over my shoulders.”
She, too, wore a raccoon. As I took it from the hook I wished it had been something else. But Stephanie’s coat was newer than this one and twice as heavy. These pelts had dried out, and the fur was thin. The woman was already on her way out, and stooped as I laid the raccoon over over her back. Marchek’s office had its own exit to the corridor.
At the top of the staircase, the woman asked me to help her down. I said that I would, of course, but I wanted to look once more for my brother-in-law. As she tied the woolen scarf under her chin she smiled at me, with an Oriental wrinkling of her eyes.
Not to check in with Philip wouldn’t have been right. My hope was that he would be returning, coming down the narrow corridor in his burly, sauntering, careless way. You won’t remember your Uncle Philip. He had played college football, and he still had the look of a tackle, with his swelling, compact forearms. (At Soldier Field today he’d be physically insignificant; in his time, however, he was something of a strongman.)
But there was the long strip of carpet down the middle of the wall-valley, and no one was coming to rescue me. I turned back to his office. If only a patient were sitting in the chair and I could see Philip looking into his mouth, I’d be on track again, excused from taking the woman’s challenge. One alternative was to say that I couldn’t go with her, that Philip expected me to ride back with him to the Northwest Side. In the empty office I considered this lie, bending my head so that I wouldn’t confront the clock with its soundless measured weights revolving. Then I wrote on Philip’s memo pad: “Louie, passing by.” I left it on the seat of the chair.
The woman had put her arms through the sleeves of the collegiate, rah-rah raccoon and was resting her fur-bundled rear on the banister. She was passing her compact mirror back and forth, and when I came out she gave the compact a snap and dropped it into her purse.
“Still the charley horse?”
“My lower back too.”
We descended, very slow, both feet on each tread. I wondered what she would do if I were to kiss her. Laugh at me, probably. We were no longer between the four walls where anything might have happened. In the street, space was unlimited. I had no idea how far we were going, how far I would be able to go. Although she was the one claiming to be in pain, it was I who felt sick. She asked me to support her lower back with my hand, and there I discovered what an extraordinary action her hips could perform. At a party I had overheard an older woman saying to another lady, “I know how to make them burn.” Hearing this was enough for me.
No special art was necessary with a boy of seventeen, not even so much as being invited to support her with my hand—to feel that intricate, erotic working of her back. I had already seen_ the woman on Marchek’s examining table and had also felt the full weight of her when she leaned—when she laid her female substance on me. Moreover, she fully knew my mind. She was the thing I was thinking continually, and how often does thought find its object in circumstances like these—the object knowing_ that it has been found? The woman knew my expectations. She was,_ in the flesh, those expectations. I couldn’t have sworn that she was a hooker, a tramp. She might have been an ordinary
family girl with a taste for trampishness, acting loose, amusing herself with me, doing a comic sex turn as in those days people sometimes did.
“Where are we headed?”
“If you have to go, I can make it on my own,” she said. “It’s just Winona Street, the other side of Sheridan Road.”
“No, no. I’ll walk you there.”
She asked whether I was still at school, pointing to the printed pages in my coat pocket.
I observed when we were passing a fruit shop (a boy of my own age emptying bushels of oranges into the lighted window) that, despite the woman’s thick-cream color, her eyes were Far Eastern, black.
“You should be about seventeen,” she said.
“Just.”
She was wearing pumps in the snow and placed each step with care.
“What are you going to be—have you picked your profession?”
I had no use for professions. Utterly none. There were accountants and engineers in the soup lines. In the world slump, professions were useless. You were free, therefore, to make something extraordinary of yourself. I might have said, if I hadn’t been excited to the point of sickness, that I didn’t ride around the city on the cars to make a buck or to be useful to the family, but to take a reading or this boring, depressed, ugly, endless, rotting city. I couldn’t have thought it then, but I now understand that my purpose was to interpret this place. Its power was tremendous. But so was mine, potentially. I refused absolutely to believe for a moment that people here were doing what they thought they were doing. Beneath the apparent life of these streets was their real life, beneath each face the real face, beneath each voice and its words the true tone and the real message. Of course, I wasn’t about to say such things. It was beyond me at that time to say them. I was, however, a high-toned kid, “La-di-dah,” my critical, satirical brother Albert called me. A high purpose in adolescence will expose you to that.
At the moment, a glamorous, sexual girl had me in tow. I couldn’t guess where I was being led, nor how far, nor what she would surprise me with, nor the consequences.
“So the dentist is your brother?”
“In-law—my sister’s husband. They live with us. You’re asking what he’s like? He’s a good guy. He likes to lock his office on Friday and go to the races. He takes me to the fights. Also, at the back of the drugstore there’s a poker game….”
“He_ doesn’t go around with books in his pocket.”
“Well, no, he doesn’t. He says, ‘What’s the use? There’s too much to keep up or catch up with. You could never in a thousand years do it, so why knock yourself out?’ My sister wants him to open a Loop office, but that would be too much of a strain. I guess he’s for inertia. He’s not ready to do more than he’s already doing.”
“So what are you reading—what’s it about?”
I didn’t propose to discuss anything with her. I wasn’t capable of it. What I had in mind just then was entirely different.
But suppose I had been able to explain. One does have a responsibility to answer genuine questions: “You see, miss, this is the visible world. We live in it, we breathe its air and eat its substance. When we die, however, matter goes to matter, and then we’re annihilated. Now, which world do we really belong to, this world of matter or another world, from which matter takes its orders?”
Not many people were willing to talk about such notions. They made even Stephanie impatient. “When you die, that’s it. Dead is dead,” she would say. She loved a good time. And when I wouldn’t take her downtown to the Oriental Theatre she didn’t deny herself the company of other boys. She brought back off-color vaudeville jokes. I think the Oriental was part of a national entertainment circuit. Jimmy Savo, Lou Holtz, and Sophie Tucker played there. I was sometimes too solemn for Stephanie. When she gave imitations of Jimmy Savo singing “River, Stay Away from My Door,” bringing her knees together and holding herself tight, she didn’t break me up, and she was disappointed.
You would have thought that the book or book fragment in my pocket was a talisman from a fairy tale to open castle gates or carry me to mountaintops. Yet when the woman asked me what it was, I was too scattered to tell her. Remember, I still kept my hand as instructed on her lower back, tormented by that sexual grind of her movements. I was discovering what the lady at the party had meant by saying, “I know how to make them burn.” So of course I was in no condition to talk about the Ego and the Will, or about the secrets of the blood. Yes, I believed that higher knowledge was shared out among all human beings. What else was there to hold us together but this force hidden behind daily consciousness? But to be coherent about it now was absolutely out of the question.
“Can’t you tell me?” she said.
“I bought this for a nickel from a bargain table.”
“That’s how you spend your money?”
I assumed her to mean that I didn’t spend it on girls.
“And the dentist is a good-natured, lazy guy,” she went on. “What has he got to tell you?”
I tried to review the mental record. What did Phil Haddis say? He said that a stiff prick has no conscience. At the moment it was all I could think of. It amused Philip to talk to me. He was a chum. Where Philip was indulgent, my brother Albert, your late uncle, was harsh. Albert might have taught me something if he had trusted me. He was then a night-school law student clerking for Rowland, the racketeer congressman. He was Rowland’s bagman, and Rowland hired him not to read law but to make collections. Philip suspected that Albert was skimming, for he dressed sharply. He wore a derby (called, in those days, a Baltimore heater) and a camel’s-hair topcoat and pointed, mafioso shoes. Toward me, Albert was scornful. He said, “You don’t understand fuck-all. You never will.”
We were approaching Winona Street, and when we got to her building she’d have no further use for me and send me away. I’d see no more than the flash of the glass and then stare as she let herself in. She was already feeling in her purse for the keys. I was no longer supporting her back, preparing instead to mutter “Bye-bye,” when she surprised me with a sideward nod, inviting me to enter. I think I had hoped (with sex-polluted hope) that she would leave me in the street. I followed her through another tile lobby and through the inner door. The staircase was fiercely heated by coal-fueled radiators, the skylight three stories up was wavering, the wallpaper had come unstuck and was curling and bulging. I swallowed my breath. I couldn’t draw this heat into my lungs.
This had been a deluxe apartment house once, built for bankers, brokers, and well-to-do professionals. Now it was occupied by transients. In the big front room with its French windows there was a crap game. In the next room people were drinking or drowsing on the old chesterfields. The woman led me through what had once been a private bar—some of the fittings were still in place. Then I followed her through the kitchen—I would have gone anywhere, no questions asked. In the kitchen there were no signs of cooking, neither pots nor dishes. The linoleum was shredding, brown fibers standing like hairs. She led me into a narrower corridor, parallel to the main one. “I have what used to be a maid’s room,” she said. “It’s got a nice view of the alley, but there is a private bathroom.”
And here we were—an almost empty space. So this was how whores operated—assuming that she was a whore: a bare floor, a narrow cot, a chair by the window, a lopsided clothespress against the wall. I stopped under the light fixture while she passed behind, as if to observe me. Then from the back she gave me a hug and a small kiss on the cheek, more promissory than actual. Her face powder, or perhaps it was her lipstick, had a sort of green-banana fragrance. My heart had never beaten as hard as this.
She said, “Why don’t I go into the bathroom awhile and get ready while you undress and lie down in bed. You look like you were brought up neat, so lay your clothes on the chair. You don’t want to drop them on the floor.”
Shivering (this seemed the one cold room in the house), I began to pull off my things, beginning with the winter-wrinkled boots. The s
heepskin I hung over the back of the chair. I pushed my socks into the boots and then my bare feet recoiled from the grit underfoot. I took off everything, as if to disassociate my shirt, my underthings, from whatever it was that was about to happen, so that only my body could be guilty. The one thing that couldn’t be excepted. When I pulled back the cover and got in, I was thinking that the beds in Bridewell prison would be like this. There was no pillowcase; my head lay on the ticking. What I saw of the outside were the utility wires hung between the poles like lines on music paper, only sagging, and the glass insulators like clumps of notes. The woman had said nothing about money. Because she liked me. I couldn’t believe my luck—luck with a hint of disaster. I blinded myself to the Bridewell metal cot, not meant for two. I felt also that I couldn’t hold out if she kept me waiting long. And what feminine thing was she doing in there—undressing, washing, perfuming, changing?
Abruptly, she came out. She had been waiting, nothing else. She still wore the raccoon coat, even the gloves. Without looking at me she walked very quickly, almost running, and opened the window. As soon as the window shot up, it let in a blast of cold air, and I stood up on the bed but it was too late to stop her. She took my clothes from the back of the chair and heaved them out. They fell into the alley. I shouted, “What are you doing!” She still refused to turn her head. As she ran away, tying the scarf under her chin, she left the door open. I could hear her pumps beating double time in the hallway.
I couldn’t run after her, could I, and show myself naked to the people in the flat? She had banked on this. When we came in, she must have given the high sign to the man she worked with, and he had been waiting in the alley. When I ran to look out, my things had already been gathered up. All I saw was the back of somebody with a bundle under his arm hurrying in the walkway between two garages. I might have picked up my boots—those she had left me—and jumped from the first-floor window, but I couldn’t chase the man very far, and in a few minutes 1 would have wound up on Sheridan Road naked and freezing.