by Saul Bellow
“No, please, I didn’t come for that.”
“But you probably need it now.”
“Why, I haven’t even touched my last month’s pay.”
“My father sends me an allowance from Jamaica. That’s where he is. Of course I can’t live on it. I haven’t done any too well recently.” This was not a complaint but sounded as though soon she’d do better. “Oliver set me back. I depended on him. I thought I was in love with him. Did you love that girl you were with?”
“Yes,” I said. I’m glad I didn’t lie, I may say.
“She must have hated me like poison.”
“She married a captain out in the Pacific.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Oh no, don’t be. It’s been over for quite a while.”
“I felt in the wrong afterward. But you were the only person who would have helped me. And I never thought—”
“I’m glad I was able to help. As far as that goes, I came out way ahead.”
“It’s nice of you to say so. But you know—now that it’s finished you won’t care if I say it—I thought we were in the same boat. Everybody said how she—”
“Went hunting without me. I know.” I hoped she wouldn’t mention Talavera.
“You got into trouble without knowing it, the way I did. Maybe you deserved it though—like me. It served me right. I was on my way to Hollywood with him. Mexico was just a side trip; he was going to make a star of me. Wasn’t that ridiculous?”
“No, it wasn’t. You’d make a first-rate star. But how could Oliver do that to you when he knew he was going to jail?”
“He put it over easily because for a while I was in love.”
It went to my head when she spoke that word.
I was constructing higher and higher, up to the top spheres, and simultaneously committing a dozen crimes to achieve my end. The cat scratched my hand as it swung by the chair. I thought I was going to have a nosebleed also, from passion. One minute I felt gross and swollen, and the next my soul was up there concertizing among her brilliant sister souls.
“Or worse than ridiculous,” said she, pointedly.
Worse? Oh, how she paid her way, did she mean? She didn’t have to say that. It pained me that she should feel such explanations necessary. I certainly was lucky to be seated; my legs wouldn’t have kept me up.
“Why, what’s the matter?” she said in her warmhearted voice.
I begged her not to make fun, please. I said, “When I was covered with bandages and playing poker at the Chinaman’s, how could you think we were in the same boat?”
“I’m sure you remember how we looked at each other that day in the bar where they had that monkey thing.”
“The kinkajou.”
Crossing her hands in her lap and bringing her knees together around them—which I admired and wished she would, however, not do—she said, “Nobody should pretend to be always one hundred per cent honest. I wish I knew how to be seventy, sixty per cent.”
I swore she must be one hundred and ten, two hundred. Then I said something I didn’t expect myself. I said, “Nobody should be a mystery intentionally. Unintentionally is mysterious enough.”
“I’ll try not to be. With you, anyway.”
She was sincere. I knew it. I saw how her throat suddenly grew full.
My body, which is maybe all I am, this effortful creature, felt subject to currents and helpless. I wanted to go and hug her by the legs, but I thought I’d better wait. For why should I assume it would be right? Because I felt like?
I said, “I suppose you see how I’m getting to feel about you. If I’m making a mistake, you’d better tell me.”
“A mistake? Why do you say that?”
“Well, in the first place,” I said, “I haven’t been here long. You’ll think I’m in too much of a hurry.”
“And the second place? What makes you speak so slowly?”
Was I speaking in an unusual way? I didn’t even know it. “In the second, I feel I did wrong in Cuernavaca by going back.”
“Maybe you can do right this time,” she said.
Then I dropped to the ground and hugged her legs. She bent to kiss me. I would have hurried, but her idea was to be slower. She said, “We’d better shut the animals in the kitchen.” She collared the dog, I lifted up the cat from underneath, and we put them there. The kitchen door was fastened with a bent nail, having no knob or hook. Then she took the cover from the bed and we helped each other to undress.
“What are you saying to yourself?” she whispered when we lay down. I wasn’t aware that I was saying anything. I was afraid she would bump her head against the wall and tried to cover it with my hands, which she then understood, and helped me. I was hungry and kissed her wherever my mouth could reach, till she kept my lip in her teeth and drew on me, drew on me. Nothing could be put over by effort any more, and there was nothing to try.
Was she a vain person, or injurious or cynical, it couldn’t make any difference now. Or was I a foolish, uncorrected, blundering, provisional, unreliable man, this was taken away as of no account and couldn’t have any sense or meaning. The real truth about one or the other was simpler than any such description.
I told her I loved her. It was true. I felt I had come to the end of my trouble and hankering, and it was conclusive. As we lay in bed kissing, whispering, and loving all weekend long, the air was strong and blue outside, the sun was splendid and sailed around handsome and haughty. We got up only to take the dog, Harry, to the roof. The cat walked on the covers over the bed and kneaded us with its paws. The only people we saw were two old guys playing pinochle on a cutting table of the dress factory over the way.
However, Monday morning I had to be back at the base. She woke me in the middle of the night and got me dressed and went down with me to the subway.
I kept asking, Would she marry me? She said, “You want all your troubles to be over all of a sudden and you’re so anxious for it you may be making a mistake.”
This was just before dawn, by the descent-into-hell stairs of the subway, just under the Eastern vault of wired glass, and the blackout light like a dumb posy on its thick iron. So by this blue illumination we were kissing with loving faces until it began to drizzle and her slippers got wet.
“Darling, go home,” I said.
“Will you phone me?”
“Every chance I get. Do you love me?”
“Of course I love you.”
Every time she said this I was so moved that happy gratitude poured over me down to my very feet while my back-hair prickled. Like when you’re swimming in the pleasure of the sea and feel some contact come up behind. All the deep breathes like silent concertinas and the shore is gay with stripes and bunting.
Finally I had to go down into the tunnel and take a train. I couldn’t see her for five days. And meantime I didn’t dare fall behind in the Purser’s School or tangle with a master-at-arms and lose my next liberty. Every evening I went down by the sea where the phone booths were; and she was often out, having a busy life. I had a terrible fear that she had spent the weekend with me out of friendliness alone, or so that I would understand better what should have happened in the mountains that night. If this was so, I was sunk, for by now I was more in love than I could stand, as if some mineral had got into my veins and arteries and I ached, flesh and bones, the way you will on the verge of the grippe.
All week the freighters groaned in from the sea, while Coney Island was wrapped in gray or lilac fog and I sat with a suffering spirit of love in the phone booth after evening chow trying to do my lessons and waiting for her to answer. I was afraid I was too much of a latecomer and had nothing to expect. In which case I was ruined, because everything now depended on her.
On Saturday, in a fever, I got off the base as soon as the usual parade shenanigans were over. What a state I was in! When I rode over the bridge from Brooklyn suspended on those heaven-hung struts over the brick valleys, then the fiery flux of harbor water, the speedy gull
s, the battleships open like vast radio sets in the yards, beast-horns of Hengist and Horsa, and then the tunnel again, I felt that if I had to continue to ride and ride I would certainly not last but would give out.
But there was no need to be scared, for Stella was waiting. She had been sick all week because I wasn’t there, running a temperature, wondering did I love her. She cried when we were in bed, with her hands pressed on my back and her breasts against me. She said that when she saw me in front of the cathedral from the balcony of the bar where the Carta Blanca shield was hung she fell in love with me. She didn’t even need the money she borrowed from me at Cuernavaca but took it as a means of keeping in touch. As for Oliver—
“What’s it to me what happened with Oliver? It’s none of my business,” I said. “I want to get married.”
Clem had urged me to be engaged for six months, in view of my personality and make-up. But this advice was good for people who were merely shopping, not for someone who had lived all his life with one great object.
“Of course,” she said, “I want to get married if you love me.”
I deeply assured her.
“If you still love me after lunch,” she said, “ask me again.”
She brought the lunch to me in bed, which was a bed she had bought at an auction, ivory colored and painted with wreaths and Arcadia roses. It came from Bavaria. Well, she served me here, and wouldn’t even let me butter my own bread. As if I was the Elector, I got waited on hand and foot, and in turn I gave the animal staff ham trimmings and leftovers.
She felt obliged to tell me all she could about herself.
“I buy a ticket in the Irish Sweepstakes every year,” she said.
I could see nothing objectionable in this.
“Also I’m a mystic, a Gurdjieff follower.”
This was a new one on me. She showed me a picture of this old boy, a shaved head, deep eyes, and mustachios of the old school of Crimean fighter. I saw no special harm in him.
What else? She spent lots of money on clothes. This I could see; her closets were stuffed with dresses. But I didn’t bother my head about it. Since she went along with me in my scheme for the foster-home and academy, and she enthusiastically did, what difference could her wardrobe make? In fact, I was proud that she was so elegant. Also she owed money, she said.
“Why, darling, don’t worry, we’ll pay everybody. C’est la moindre des choses, as they say on the other side.” When I was loved and sitting in a fine bed like this, I was just like royalty and disposed of all matters with a word.
We decided to get married as soon as I graduated from Sheepshead.
Chapter 24
I SEE BEFORE ME next a fellow named Mintouchian, who is an Armenian, of course. We are sitting together in a Turkish bath having a conversation, except that Mintouchian is doing most of the talking, explaining various facts of existence to me, by allegory mostly. The time is a week before Stella and I were married and I shipped out.
This Mintouchian was a monument of a person, with his head very abrupt at the back, as Armenian heads tend sometimes to be, but lionlike in front, with red cheekbones. He had legs on him like that statue of Clemenceau on the Champs Elysées where Clemenceau is striding against a wind and is thinking of bread and war, and the misery and grandeur, going on with last strength in his longjohns and gaiters.
Sitting together in this little white-tile room, Mintouchian and I were quite pals in spite of differences of age and income—Mintouchian was supposed to be loaded. He looked overpowering, and he had tones in his voice like the dumping of coal. This must have done him good in court, as he was a lawyer. He was a friend of a friend of Stella whose name was Agnes Kuttner. Agnes lived in big style in an apartment off Fifth Avenue near one of the Latin-American embassies, furnished in Empire, with tremendous mirrors and chandeliers, Chinese screens, alabaster birds of night, thick drapes, and all luxuries like that. She went around to auction rooms and bought up treasures of the Romanoffs and Hapsburgs; she herself came from Vienna. Mintouchian had set up a trust fund for her, so she wasn’t at all in the business of antiques, and her apartment was his home away from home, as hotels sometimes falsely speak of themselves. His other home was also in New York, but his wife was an invalid. Every evening he went and had dinner with her, served by her nurse in the bedroom. But before this he had visited Agnes. Usually his chauffeur was driving him across Central Park at 7:45 for the meal with his wife.
The reason why I was with him in the bath this particular afternoon was that Stella had gone shopping with Agnes for the wedding. These two, Agnes and Mintouchian, were the only people we ever saw when I got liberty from the base on weekends. He enjoyed taking us to Toots Shor’s or the Diamond Horseshoe, I think, and other scarlet-and-gold-door places. The one time I tried to pick up the tab he pushed me away. I would have had to borrow from Stella to pay it. But Mintouchian was very openhanded, a grand good-time Charlie. Almost always in evening clothes of Rembrandt blackness, with his red-edged eyes and craggy head and ears, and as if smelling the sands and savannahs with his flat nose, but a smile of spin-on-the-music, spend-the-money; his teeth were long, and he was ever so slightly feline-whiskered to go with his corrupt, intelligent wrinkles and expanding mouth. Amid the ladies he didn’t let go with this smile, but now when he sat like a village headman of the south of Asia in his carnival-colors towel, he did; and while conversing more man to man he was pinching himself under the eyes to make the bags disappear—his yellow toenails were lacquered with clear polish, except the small toes grievously buried in the lifeworn foot with its skinful of vessels. I wondered if he was really one of those hot-to-the-touch and perilous guys like Zaharoff or Juan March, or the Swedish Match King or Jake the Barber or Three-Finger Brown. Stella said he had money he hadn’t even folded yet. He certainly was laying out plenty for Agnes, whom he had met in Cuba; he paid her husband a remittance to stay there. However, even though I found out that Mintouchian wasn’t strictly honest, he was never a rogue’s-gallery character. To get his legal education, as a matter of fact, he had played the organ in silent movies. But he was a crack lawyer now and had global business interests, and, moreover, he was a lettered person and reader. It was one of his curiosities to figure out historical happenings like the building of the Berlin-Baghdad Railway or the Battle of Tannenberg, and he furthermore knew a lot about the lives of Martyrs. He was another of those persons who persistently arise before me with life counsels and illumination throughout my entire earthly pilgrimage.
I couldn’t figure out what he saw in Agnes, who was obviously the boss over him. Her eyes were deep brown, of an aristocratic favorite of cafés and carriages of Imperial days, although she must have been only a child in those times. And what’s more, she had a slight depression on either side of her turned-up nose which made her look not exactly of an open nature. Nevertheless she was Stella’s friend, and Mintouchian loved her. This made me think of the deep wishes of elderly people, or desires unslayable short of total demolition by death.
“Death!” Mintouchian said it himself. He was describing how he was subject to strokes. He said, “I don’t want to make you gloomy, so close to your wedding.”
“Oh no, sir, you couldn’t make me gloomy. I love Stella too much to consider it.”
“Well, I won’t say that I was as happy as you, but I was also very feeling when I got married. Maybe it came from playing the mood music, which I was then doing. For sea adventures I’d play ‘Fingal’s Cave.’ For Rudolph Valentino, ‘Orientale,’ César Cui, Tchaikovsky’s ‘Sehnsucht.’ Also ‘Poet and Peasant.’ You try to fight this stuff, when Milton Sills sees Conway Tearle didn’t go down on the Titanic, or something. I was playing it all from my book on torts, boning up for the bar exam. But all the same, those were times of emotion. Or maybe you think this is guff?”
“No, why?”
“You think I’m a bandit, only you wouldn’t say it on a bet. You fight your malice too much.”
“Everybody says so. It’s
as if you were supposed to have low opinions. I’d never say I was angelic, but I respect as much as I can.”
Mintouchian said, “In one day of practice I see more than you could imagine if it was a project. The Balzac Comédie Humaine is child’s play in comparison. I wake up in the morning and have to ask myself, ‘Now in the case of Shiml versus Shiml, who is screwing who? Who is going to be in worse shape in the end? The man who takes the child away from the living-in-sin mother? The lover who makes her give up the kid to avoid the publicity so it won’t harm his business? The mother who does anything for the lover?’ Ribono shel Olam!”
I was surprised by this phrase, which he explained as follows: “My father was janitor of a synagogue, and I hung around the cellar. I had an uncle who was a colonel in the Boer War. Who is what? So if history casts a strange or even ridiculous light on us, we are still all serious, aren’t we? We die anyway.” He went back to the subject of his strokes. “Here several years ago I was sitting on the toilet figuring a big deal mentally when suddenly the Angel of Death plucked me by the nose. My mind turned black. I fell on my face. I think if my belly hadn’t been in the way to break the force I might have been killed. As it was, the blood from my nose sprayed the door like seltzer. Which, in my vanity, I had shut. Then by and by the spark of life came back to me. My mind filled again with the typical thought and light of Mintouchian. Now, I reflected, you’re Mintouchian again. As if I had an option. Do I have to come back Mintouchian, including the distressing parts? Yes, because to live is to be Mintouchian, my dear man. I went over all my secrets and found they were still in place. I still didn’t know who was screwing whom, and I crept into my bed and shivered from the touch of death.