Seize the Day

by Saul Bellow

  “But in your line you have to have a car, eh?” said Mr. Perls.

  “Lord knows why any lunatic would want one in the city who didn’t need it for his livelihood.”

  Wilhelm’s old Pontiac was parked in the street. Formerly, when on an expense account, he had always put it up in a garage. Now he was afraid to move the car from Riverside Drive lest he lose his space, and he used it only on Saturdays when the Dodgers were playing in Ebbets Field and he took his boys to the game. Last Sunday, when the Dodgers were out of town, he had gone out to visit his mother’s grave.

  Dr. Adler had refused to go along. He couldn’t bear his son’s driving. Forgetfully, Wilhelm traveled for miles in second gear; he was seldom in the right lane and he neither gave signals nor watched for lights. The upholstery of his Pontiac was filthy with grease and ashes. One cigarette burned in the ashtray, another in his hand, a third on the floor with maps and other waste paper and Coca-Cola bottles. He dreamed at the wheel or argued and gestured, and therefore the old doctor would not ride with him.

  Then Wilhelm had come back from the cemetery angry because the stone bench between his mother’s and his grandmother’s graves had been overturned and broken by vandals. “Those damn teen-age hoodlums get worse and worse,” he said. “Why, they must have used a sledge-hammer to break the seat smack in half like that. If I could catch one of them!” He wanted the doctor to pay for a new seat, but his father was cool to the idea. He said he was going to have himself cremated.

  Mr. Perls said, “I don’t blame you if you get no sleep up where you are.” His voice was tuned somewhat sharp, as though he were slightly deaf. “Don’t you have Parigi the singing teacher there? God, they have some queer elements in this hotel. On which floor is that Estonian woman with all her cats and dogs? They should have made her leave long ago.”

  “They’ve moved her down to twelve,” said Dr. Adler.

  Wilhelm ordered a large Coca-Cola with his breakfast. Working in secret at the small envelopes in his pocket, he found two pills by touch. Much fingering had worn and weakened the paper. Under cover of a napkin he swallowed a Phenaphen sedative and a Unicap, but the doctor was sharp-eyed and said, “Wilky, what are you taking now?”

  “Just my vitamin pills.” He put his cigar butt in an ashtray on the table behind him, for his father did not like the odor. Then he drank his Coca-Cola.

  “That’s what you drink for breakfast, and not orange juice?” said Mr. Perls. He seemed to sense that he would not lose Dr. Adler’s favor by taking an ironic tone with his son.

  “The caffeine stimulates brain activity,” said the old doctor. “It does all kinds of things to the respiratory center.”

  “It’s just a habit of the road, that’s all,” Wilhelm said. “If you drive around long enough it turns your brains, your stomach, and everything else.”

  His father explained, “Wilky used to be with the Rojax Corporation. He was their northeastern sales representative for a good many years but recently ended the connection.”

  “Yes,” said Wilhelm, “I was with them from the end of the war.” He sipped the Coca-Cola and chewed the ice, glancing at one and the other with his attitude of large, shaky, patient dignity. The waitress set two boiled eggs before him.

  “What kind of line does this Rojax company manufacture?” said Mr. Perls.

  “Kiddies’ furniture. Little chairs, rockers, tables, jungle gyms, slides, swings, seesaws.”

  Wilhelm let his father do the explaining. Large and stiff-backed, he tried to sit patiently, but his feet were abnormally restless. All right! His father had to impress Mr. Perls? He would go along once more, and play his part. Fine! He would play along and help his father maintain his style. Style was the main consideration. That was just fine!

  “I was with the Rojax Corporation for almost ten years,” he said. “We parted ways because they wanted me to share my territory. They took a son-in-law into the business—a new fellow. It was his idea.”

  To himself, Wilhelm said, Now God alone can tell why I have to lay my whole life bare to this blasted herring here. I’m sure nobody else does it. Other people keep their business to themselves. Not me.

  He continued, “But the rationalization was that it was too big a territory for one man. I had a monopoly. That wasn’t so. The real reason was that they had gotten to the place where they would have to make me an officer of the corporation. Vice presidency. I was in line for it, but instead this son-in-law got in, and—”

  Dr. Adler thought Wilhelm was discussing his grievances much too openly and said, “My son’s income was up in the five figures.”

  As soon as money was mentioned, Mr. Perls’s voice grew eagerly sharper. “Yes? What, the thirty-two-per-cent bracket? Higher even, I guess?” He asked for a hint, and he named the figures not idly but with a sort of hugging relish. Uch! How they love money, thought Wilhelm. They adore money! Holy money! Beautiful money! It was getting so that people were feeble-minded about everything except money. While if you didn’t have it you were a dummy, a dummy! You had to excuse yourself from the face of the earth. Chicken! that’s what it was. The world’s business. If only he could find a way out of it.

  Such thinking brought on the usual congestion. It would grow into a fit of passion if he allowed it to continue. Therefore he stopped talking and began to eat.

  Before he struck the egg with his spoon he dried the moisture with his napkin. Then he battered it (in his father’s opinion) more than was necessary. A faint grime was left by his fingers on the white of the egg after he had picked away the shell. Dr. Adler saw it with silent repugnance. What a Wilky he had given to the world! Why, he didn’t even wash his hands in the morning. He used an electric razor so that he didn’t have to touch water. The doctor couldn’t bear Wilky’s dirty habits. Only once—and never again, he swore—had he visited his room. Wilhelm, in pajamas and stockings had sat on his bed, drinking gin from a coffee mug and rooting for the Dodgers on television. “That’s two and two on you, Duke. Come on—hit it, now.” He came down on the mattress—bam! The bed looked kicked to pieces. Then he drank the gin as though it were tea, and urged his team on with his fist. The smell of dirty clothes was outrageous. By the bedside lay a quart bottle and foolish magazines and mystery stories for the hours of insomnia. Wilhelm lived in worse filth than a savage. When the Doctor spoke to him about this he answered, “Well, I have no wife to look after my things.” And who—who!—had done the leaving? Not Margaret. The Doctor was certain that she wanted him back.

  Wilhelm drank his coffee with a trembling hand. In his full face, his abused bloodshot gray eyes moved back and forth. Jerkily he set his cup back and put half the length of a cigarette into his mouth; he seemed to hold it with his teeth, as though it were a cigar.

  “I can’t let them get away with it,” he said. “It’s also a question of morale.”

  His father corrected him. “Don’t you mean a moral question, Wilky?”

  “I mean that, too. I have to do something to protect myself. I was promised executive standing.” Correction before a stranger mortified him, and his dark-blond face changed color, more pale, and then more dark. He went on talking to Perls but his eyes spied on his father. “I was the one who opened the territory for them. I could go back for one of their competitors and take away their customers. My customers. Morale enters into it because they’ve tried to take away my confidence.”

  “Would you offer a different line to the same people?” Mr. Perls wondered.

  “Why not? I know what’s wrong with the Rojax product.”

  “Nonsense,” said his father. “Just nonsense and kid’s talk, Wilky. You’re only looking for trouble and embarrassment that way. What would you gain by such a silly feud? You have to think about making a living and meeting your obligations.”

  Hot and bitter, Wilhelm said with pride, while his feet moved angrily under the table, “I don’t have to be told about my obligations. I’ve been meeting them for years. In more than twenty years I
’ve never had a penny of help from anybody. I preferred to dig a ditch on the WPA but never asked anyone to meet my obligations for me.”

  “Wilky has had all kinds of experiences,” said Dr. Adler.

  The old doctor’s face had a wholesome reddish and almost translucent color, like a ripe apricot. The wrinkles beside his ears were deep because the skin conformed so tightly to his bones. With all his might, he was a healthy and fine small old man. He wore a white vest of a light check pattern. His hearing-aid doodad was in the pocket. An unusual shirt of red and black stripes covered his chest. He bought his clothes in a college shop farther uptown. Wilhelm thought he had no business to get himself up like a jockey, out of respect for his profession.

  “Well,” said Mr. Perls. “I can understand how you feel. You want to fight it out. By a certain time of life, to have to start all over again can’t be a pleasure, though a good man can always do it. But anyway you want to keep on with a business you know already, and not have to meet a whole lot of new contacts.”

  Wilhelm again thought, Why does it have to be me and my life that’s discussed, and not him and his life? He would never allow it. But I am an idiot. I have no reserve. To me it can be done. I talk. I must ask for it. Everybody wants to have intimate conversations, but the smart fellows don’t give out, only the fools. The smart fellows talk intimately about the fools, and examine them all over and give them advice. Why do I allow it? The hint about his age had hurt him. No, you can’t admit it’s as good as ever, he conceded. Things do give out.

  “In the meantime,” Dr. Adler said, “Wilky is taking it easy and considering various propositions. Isn’t that so?”

  “More or less,” said Wilhelm. He suffered his father to increase Mr. Perls’s respect for him. The WPA ditch had brought the family into contempt. He was a little tired. The spirit, the peculiar burden of his existence lay upon him like an accretion, a load, a hump. In any moment of quiet, when sheer fatigue prevented him from struggling, he was apt to feel this mysterious weight, this growth or collection of nameless things which it was the business of his life to carry about. That must be what a man was for. This large, odd, excited, fleshy, blond, abrupt personality named Wilhelm, or Tommy, was here, present, in the present—Dr. Tamkin had been putting into his mind many suggestions about the present moment, the here and now—this Wilky, or Tommy Wilhelm, forty-four years old, father of two sons, at present living in the Hotel Gloriana, was assigned to be the carrier of a load which was his own self, his characteristic self. There was no figure or estimate for the value of this load. But it is probably exaggerated by the subject, T. W. Who is a visionary sort of animal. Who has to believe that he can know why he exists. Though he has never seriously tried to find out why.

  Mr. Perls said, “If he wants time to think things over and have a rest, why doesn’t he run down to Florida for a while? Off season it’s cheap and quiet. Fairyland. The mangoes are just coming in. I got two acres down there. You’d think you were in India.”

  Mr. Perls utterly astonished Wilhelm when he spoke of fairyland with a foreign accent. Mangoes—India? What did he mean, India?

  “Once upon a time,” said Wilhelm, “I did some public-relations work for a big hotel down in Cuba. If I could get them a notice in Leonard Lyons or one of the other columns it might be good for another holiday there, gratis. I haven’t had a vacation for a long time, and I could stand a rest after going so hard. You know that’s true, Father.” He meant that his father knew how deep the crisis was becoming; how badly he was strapped for money; and that he could not rest but would be crushed if he stumbled; and that his obligations would destroy him. He couldn’t falter. He thought, The money! When I had it, I flowed money. They bled it away from me. I hemorrhaged money. But now it’s almost all gone, and where am I supposed to turn for more?

  He said, “As a matter of fact, Father, I am tired as hell.”

  But Mr. Perls began to smile and said, “I understand from Doctor Tamkin that you’re going into some kind of investment with him, partners.”

  “You know, he’s a very ingenious fellow,” said Dr. Adler. “I really enjoy hearing him go on. I wonder if he really is a medical doctor.”

  “Isn’t he?” said Perls. “Everybody thinks he is. He talks about his patients. Doesn’t he write prescriptions?”

  “I don’t really know what he does,” said Dr. Adler. “He’s a cunning man.”

  “He’s a psychologist, I understand,” said Wilhelm.

  “I don’t know what sort of psychologist or psychiatrist he may be,” said his father. “He’s a little vague. It’s growing into a major industry, and a very expensive one. Fellows have to hold down very big jobs in order to pay those fees. Anyway, this Tamkin is clever. He never said he practiced here, but I believed he was a doctor in California. They don’t seem to have much legislation out there to cover these things, and I hear a thousand dollars will get you a degree from a Los Angeles correspondence school. He gives the impression of knowing something about chemistry, and things like hypnotism. I wouldn’t trust him, though.”

  “And why wouldn’t you?” Wilhelm demanded.

  “Because he’s probably a liar. Do you believe he invented all the things he claims?”

  Mr. Perls was grinning.

  “He was written up in Fortune,” said Wilhelm. “Yes, in Fortune magazine. He showed me the article. I’ve seen his clippings.”

  “That doesn’t make him legitimate,” said Dr. Adler. “It might have been another Tamkin. Make no mistake, he’s an operator. Perhaps even crazy.”

  “Crazy, you say?”

  Mr. Perls put in, “He could be both sane and crazy. In these days nobody can tell for sure which is which.”

  “An electrical device for truck drivers to wear in their caps,” said Dr. Adler, describing one of Tamkin’s proposed inventions. “To wake them with a shock when they begin to be drowsy at the wheel. It’s triggered by the change in blood-pressure when they start to doze.”

  “It doesn’t sound like such an impossible thing to me,” said Wilhelm.

  Mr. Perls said, “To me he described an underwater suit so a man could walk on the bed of the Hudson in case of an atomic attack. He said he could walk to Albany in it.”

  “Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!” cried Dr. Adler in his old man’s voice. “Tamkin’s Folly. You could go on a camping trip under Niagara Falls.”

  “This is just his kind of fantasy,” said Wilhelm. “It doesn’t mean a thing. Inventors are supposed to be like that. I get funny ideas myself. Everybody wants to make something. Any American does.”

  But his father ignored this and said to Perls, “What other inventions did he describe?”

  While the frazzle-faced Mr. Perls and his father in the unseemly, monkey-striped shirt were laughing, Wilhelm could not restrain himself and joined in with his own panting laugh. But he was in despair. They were laughing at the man to whom he had given a power of attorney over his last seven hundred dollars to speculate for him in the commodities market. They had bought all that lard. It had to rise today. By ten o’clock, or half-past ten, trading would be active, and he would see.

  III

  Between white tablecloths and glassware and glancing silverware, through overfull light, the long figure of Mr. Perls went away into the darkness of the lobby. He thrust with his cane, and dragged a large built-up shoe which Wilhelm had not included in his estimate of troubles. Dr. Adler wanted to talk about him. “There’s a poor man,” he said, “with a bone condition which is gradually breaking him up.”

  “One of those progressive diseases?” said Wilhelm.

  “Very bad. I’ve learned,” the doctor told him, “to keep my sympathy for the real ailments. This Perls is more to be pitied than any man I know.”

  Wilhelm understood he was being put on notice and did not express his opinion. He ate and ate. He did not hurry but kept putting food on his plate until he had gone through the muffins and his father’s strawberries, and then some pieces of bacon tha
t were left; he had several cups of coffee, and when he was finished he sat gigantically in a state of arrest and didn’t seem to know what he should do next.

  For a while father and son were uncommonly still. Wilhelm’s preparations to please Dr. Adler had failed completely, for the old man kept thinking, You’d never guess he had a clean upbringing, and, What a dirty devil this son of mine is. Why can’t he try to sweeten his appearance a little? Why does he want to drag himself like this? And he makes himself look so idealistic.

  Wilhelm sat, mountainous. He was not really so slovenly as his father found him to be. In some aspects he even had a certain delicacy. His mouth, though broad, had a fine outline, and his brow and his gradually incurved nose, dignity, and in his blond hair there was white but there were also shades of gold and chestnut. When he was with the Rojax Corporation Wilhelm had kept a small apartment in Roxbury, two rooms in a large house with a small porch and garden, and on mornings of leisure, in late spring weather like this, he used to sit expanded in a wicker chair with the sunlight pouring through the weave, and sunlight through the slug-eaten holes of the young hollyhocks and as deeply as the grass allowed into small flowers. This peace (he forgot that that time had had its troubles, too), this peace was gone. It must not have belonged to him, really, for to be here in New York with his old father was more genuinely like his life. He was well aware that he didn’t stand a chance of getting sympathy from his father, who said he kept his for real ailments. Moreover, he advised himself repeatedly not to discuss his vexatious problems with him, for his father, with some justice, wanted to be left in peace. Wilhelm also knew that when he began to talk about these things he made himself feel worse, he became congested with them and worked himself into a clutch. Therefore he warned himself, Lay off, pal. It’ll only be an aggravation. From a deeper source, however, came other promptings. If he didn’t keep his troubles before him he risked losing them altogether, and he knew by experience that this was worse. And furthermore, he could not succeed in excusing his father on the ground of old age. No. No, he could not. I am his son, he thought. He is my father. He is as much father as I am son—old or not. Affirming this, though in complete silence, he sat, and, sitting, he kept his father at the table with him.