by Saul Bellow
I said, “What’s the matter—what goes on?”
“Renée tried to commit suicide last night,” he said. “She took sleeping pills. I got there as she was passing out, I shook her and slapped her, I made her walk, threw her in a cold bath until the doctor got there—and she’s alive. She’ll be all right.”
“Was it a real attempt? Did she mean business?”
“The doctor said she wasn’t really in danger. Maybe she didn’t know how many pills to take.”
“That doesn’t sound likely to me.”
“Me neither. She must have been faking. She is a counterfeiter. It wasn’t the first time by a long shot.” I got a glimpse of struggles that probably could never make sense. It afflicted me.
“People will act themselves into something at last though,” he went on. “They get carried away.” And he said, “If it’s for pleasure you pay a steep price, okay. But suppose it’s a price for no pleasure. Only trying to have it. Wanting pleasure. You pay for what you want, not always what you get. That’s what a price means. Otherwise where’s the price? The payment is in something you’re liable to run short on.”
“I wish I knew of anything I could do.”
“You could shove me in front of a train,” he said.
He began to tell me what had happened. Charlotte had found out about Renée. “I think she knew for a long time,” he said, “but I guess she wanted to wait.” It would have been surprising if Charlotte hadn’t known. Information and thoughts about Simon were streaming through her mind all the time. Everybody knew him in the downtown district. The waiter who brought the strawberries in the pewter dishes said, “Here you are, Mr. March.” Renée was with Simon all the time too, and they were continually playing with the chance of discovery. Why did she drive him almost to the door? One day after she left I picked up a gold comb from the floor of the car, and he said, “Damn her, she’s too careless,” and put it in his pocket. Now it couldn’t be that during two years Charlotte hadn’t found anything—no gold hairs, no hankies, no matches in the glove compartment from salons she didn’t go to; or that she couldn’t read in Simon’s husbandly homecoming with hat and evening paper, kiss of the cheek or married joke on the backside, that only five minutes before, in only the time it took to park the car and ride up in the elevator, he had been with another woman. She certainly must have. I figure that for a while she’d have said to herself, “What I don’t see with my own eyes won’t hurt me”—this not quite deliberate blindness but the tight grasp of people who devise very deeply. Somebody wrestling a bear for dear life, and with forehead lost against the grizzly pelt, figuring anyway what to do next Sunday, whom to invite to dinner and how to fix the table.
But with Charlotte you never could tell. She perhaps understood that with a lot of noise she’d drive him to be rash, because of romantic honor, and she therefore was cautious with him.
Once she explained to me, “Your brother needs money, a whole lot of money. If he didn’t have it to spend, as much as he needed, he’d die.” This astounded me when I heard it—on a hot morning it was, in the sunny, barbaric-carpeted skyscraper living room and its vases, hot breezes that blew the plants, and she herself a large figure in a white satin coat and with a cigarette holder in her rouged mouth but looking as severe as any Magnus, any of her uncles or cousins. She was as good as telling me that she was saving Simon’s life.
But he did need dough. Renée lived in the same style as Charlotte. He had a feeling that that was right; also he owed it to himself not to try to do things cheaply. When he and Charlotte went to Florida the girl came along a day or so later and stayed at as swanky a hotel. He didn’t so much worry about the expenses. What poisoned his life by this time was the slavery of constant thought and arrangement-making. He went to defy his wife, and soon he found himself twice-married.
Poor Simon! I pitied him. I pitied my brother.
All along he had been telling me the affair would never be permanent. So? How short is temporary? Eventually his idea was Renée would marry some rich man. I was once present when they discussed it.
“This guy Karham at the club,” he said. “He asked me about you after we ran into him. He wants to go out with you.”
“I won’t do it,” she said.
“You will. Don’t be a sap. We have to set you up. He’s got a lot of dough. A bachelor. In the paving business.”
“I don’t care what he’s got. He’s an ugly old man. His mouth is full of bridges. What do you think I am! Leave me alone.” She folded her arms, angry, holding her small biceps—it being warm summer she was in a sleeveless dress; she brought her knees together and looked fixedly through the windshield. You have to remember these conversations took place mostly in the car.
I told Simon afterward, “It’s you she aims to marry.”
“No, she only wants to stay with me. It suits her this way. She’s got it better than a wife.”
“Some conceit you’ve got, Simon. You mean to say she can’t think up anything better than to ride around with you every day and read movie magazines while you make your calls?”
But what he was telling me at Henrici’s now was that a few weeks before, Charlotte had come out and said the affair had gone far enough. It had to stop now. Fights broke out. But not because he disagreed with Charlotte. He knew he had to stop and told Renée, and what happened with her was even worse. She screamed, threatened to take him to court, and fainted. Next Simon’s lawyer came into the picture. He called a meeting in his office to settle everything. Renée was told Charlotte wouldn’t be there, but then Charlotte showed up. Renée cursed her. Charlotte slapped her. Simon slapped Renée too. Then they all cried, for which there seemed to be plenty of reason.
“Why did you have to slap her?”
“You should have heard what she was saying. You would have done the same,” he said. “I got carried away.”
Finally Renée agreed to go away to California provided she was paid off. And she did go. But now she was back again and said on the phone that she was pregnant. “I don’t care,” Simon told her. “You’re a crook. You took the dough and went to California when you knew you’d be coming right back.” After a silence she hung up. This was when he thought she would kill herself. And, sure enough, when he got to the hotel it was just after she had swallowed the pills.
She was in her fourth month of pregnancy.
“What’ll I do?” he said.
“What’s there to do? Nothing. There’ll be a kid now. Who knows but that this is the way you and George and I happened to come into the world.”
I comforted him the best I knew how.
Chapter 23
IF THE GREAT ANDROMEDA GALAXY had to depend on you to hold it up, where would it be now but fallen way to hell? Why, March, let the prophetic soul of the wide world dreaming on things to come (S. T. Coleridge) summon its giants and mobilizers, Caesars and Atlases. But you! you pitiful recruit, where do you come in? Go on, marry a loving wife and settle at March’s farm and academy, and don’t get in the way when the nations are furiously raging together. My friend, I said, speaking to myself, relax and knock off effort. The time is in the hands of mighty men to whom you are like the single item in the mind of the chief of a great Sears, Roebuck Company, and here come you, wishing to do right and not lead a disappointed life (sic!).
However, my conscience had already decided. I was committed and couldn’t stay, and at last the hour struck. There was a windy, flattening rain that beat the smoke down, the whole city sodden and black, the pillars of La Salle Street Station weeping. Clem said to me, “Don’t push your luck. Don’t take a risk with the clap. Don’t tell your secrets to anybody to satisfy their curiosity. Don’t get married without a six-month engagement. If you get in dutch I can always spare you a few bucks.”
I put in for the Purser’s and Pharmacist’s Mate’s School, and they took my application. For a while I had a wrangle with a psychiatrist fellow. Why had I indicated with an X that I was a bed-wetter? I i
nsisted my bed was always dry. “But here’s the X opposite the question in the Yes column.” Didn’t he realize, I said, that in filling out twenty questionnaires and taking five examinations after thirty hours without sleep on the train a man might make a single slip? “But why this slip, not another?” he said cunningly. I began to hate him very much, sitting there on his cool white fanny while his lazy eyes arrived at unpleasant conclusions about me. I said, “Do you want me to confess that I do wet the bed even though it’s not so? Or do you mean that I’d like to wet the bed?” He told me I had an aggressive character.
Anyway, before I could start at the school, they sent us away on a training cruise in Chesapeake Bay. We sailed up and down through flickering heat. The ship was a many-decked old contraption from McKinley’s time. White, an iron, floury, adrift bakery, it wallowed wide and aimless all week. The white ferries with Dixie pillars passed us by, very elegant. Or the flattop whales that had planes like kids’ jacks on the deck, and monstrous hair-stuffing smoke came from their sides. We did fire-fighting and abandon-ship drills eight or ten times a day. The boats crashed down from the davits; the trainees poured into them from manlines and cargo nets, rambunctious, mauling and horsing around, prodding with boat hooks, goosing and carrying on, screaming about female genitals. Then rowed. Hours and hours of rowing. The water curled like a huge bed of endive.
Between times you could bask on the fantail of this painted old vertical bakery, and crates, spoiled lettuces, oranges, turds, and little crabs followed on the stream or departed. The sky enamel, the sun with gold spindles. It makes me think of the picture of the fools with fish and cake and the boaters with soup-ladle oars in the painting of the old master Hieronymus B.—this idle craft with the excursion strummers, roast chicken trussed in a tree; death’s head in the little twigs above. Other scenes too: eggs spitted on knives trotting with tiny feet; men inside oyster shells carried to a cannibal banquet. Herring, meat, and other belly-goods. But, all the same, human eyes were looking out. Up to no good, maybe, but how do you know? Or the rich kings at Bethlehem. Joseph by a fire of sticks. But off in the meadow, what goes on? A wolf bleeding at a knife wound eating the swineherd who struck him, and someone else dashing like mad for the goofy towers of the city, the potato-masher castles and the pots, double-boilers, and smokehouses of habitations.
We ate plenty: flapjacks, chops, ham, spuds, steak, chili con and rice, ice cream, pie. Everybody talked about the chow, discussed the menus, and remembered home recipes.
Saturday we put in at Baltimore where the tramps of the port were waiting on Clap Hill, and the denominations with printed verses. There was mail call. Simon had been turned down for service because of a bad ear. “A way out I could’ve used,” he said. Clem wasn’t doing well at his new business. There were two letters from Sophie Geratis, now with her husband at Camp Blanding. She said farewell but kept saying it in different letters. From Einhorn there was a mimeographed message to his friends in the service, full of corny sentiment and comedy. In a personal note he added that Dingbat was a soldier in New Guinea, driving a jeep, and that he himself was ailing.
And so, more weeks of captivity on this cruise, back and forth over the bay; the same endive waves and blare of public-address system, horseplay in the head, boat drills, brine, heavy meals, sun, hell-raising, and this continual whanging away on a few elements so as to deafen you.
At last we were returned to Sheepshead, and I started to study bookkeeping and ship’s doctoring. The science part consoled me. As long as I could keep improving my mind, I figured, I was doing okay.
Sylvester was in New York. Also Stella Chesney, the girl I had helped escape in Mexico. Of course I went to see her first. On my first liberty I phoned her, and she said to come right over. So I bought a bottle of wine and the delicacies of the season and went; and of course I told myself I could use the dough she owed me and what not, but I ought to have known myself better than that.
What use was war without also love?
The place where she lived seemed to be among dress factories, silent on Saturday. As I climbed the stairs I was very excited. But I warned myself not to think we could take up where we had stopped at Cuernavaca. Oliver being in jail, chances were that there was someone else.
But there was the object of these wicked thoughts with a warm healthy face, looking innocent and happy to see me. What a beauty! My heart whanged without pity for me. I already saw myself humbled in the dust of love, the god Eros holding me down with his foot and forcing all kinds of impossible stuff on me.
She made the same impression on me that she had made the first time when I saw her on the little porch above the Carta Blanca beer shield with bulge-eyed Oliver and the two friends. Then I thought of her in the lace dress she wore in court the time Oliver socked Louie Fu. Then in the mountains under the tarpaulin when her dress and petticoat went up so fast. And there were those same legs above me. They were bare, I saw, by the white of the skylight and the reflection of the green carpet.
“Well, if it isn’t a pleasure,” she said and put out her hand. I was all dressed up in my brand-new government goods, and as I walked I felt upon me the skivvies and socks, new shoes and tight jumper and pants. To say nothing of the white cap and the embroidery of anchors on the sailor collar. “You didn’t tell me you were drafted. What a surprise!”
“When I look, I’m surprised myself,” I said.
But what I really thought of was whether to kiss her. It suddenly came back to me, to my cheek itself, what the sensation of her lips had been like in the hot market place. My face heated now. Finally I decided I’d better speak my mind, and I told her, “I can’t decide whether it would be right to kiss you.”
“Please! Don’t create a problem.” She laughed, meaning that I should. I put my lips on the side of her face, exactly as she had done to me, and I flushed instantaneous as electricity. She colored too, pleased that I had done it.
Was she not so simple and free of ulterior motives as she looked? Well, neither was I.
We sat down to talk. She wanted to know about me. “What do you do?” she asked. When not a rich young beauty’s friend, nor an eagle-tamer nor poker player, was what she meant.
“I’ve had a hard time deciding just what I should do. But now I think I was cut out to be a teacher. I want to get a place of my own and have a family. I’m tired of knocking around.”
“Oh, you like children? You’d make a good father.”
I thought it was very nice of her to say so. I wanted to offer her everything I had, suddenly. Glorious constructions began to rise in my mind, golden and complicated. Maybe she would give up whatever life she was leading for my sake. If she had another man maybe she’d quit him. Maybe he’d be killed in an automobile accident. Maybe he’d go back to his wife and children. You perhaps know yourself what such vain imaginings can be. O ye charitable gods, don’t hold it against me! My heart was beginning to bake. I couldn’t see her straight; she dazed me.
She wore velvet houseshoes, with ties; her dark hair was piled three ways; she had on an orange skirt. Her eyes looked soft and gentle. I wondered if she could look so fresh without having a lover and bothered myself about it.
I should hope!—about the father part, I mean. And what did she do? Well, it was hard to get a clear account. She mentioned various things unfamiliar to me. Women’s colleges, musical career, stage career, painting. From college there were books; from music, piano, etcetera; from the theater inscribed photos, also a sewing machine of spidery cast-iron, circa 1910, which I connected with costumes; her pictures were on the walls—flowers, oranges, bedsteads, nudes in the bath. She talked about getting on the radio and mentioned the USO and Stage-Door Canteen. I did my best to follow.
“You like my house?” she said.
It wasn’t a house but a room, a parlor, high, long, and old-fashioned, with archduke moldings of musical instruments and pears. Plants, piano, a big decorative bed, fishes, a cat and dog. The dog was a heavy breather—he was
getting on in years. The cat played around her ankles and scratched them; I quickly walloped him with a newspaper, but she didn’t like that. He sat on her shoulder, and when she said, “Kiss, Ginger—kiss, kiss,” he licked her face.
Over the way were dress factories. Scraps of material floated and waved from the wire window guards. Planes with powerful rotary noise cut the blue air clear from Britain to California. She served the wine I brought. I drank and my head gave a throb in its injured place. Then I became very heated and filled with amorous anxiety. But I thought, There’s her pride to consider, I wanted to get away from her in Cuernavaca. Why should she believe I’m falling for her now? And maybe I shouldn’t fall. What if she’s the Cressida type, as Einhorn used to call Cissy F.?
“I still intend to pay you the money you were so kind as to lend me,” she said.