by Bellow, Saul
“After all the noise about becoming a rabbi, and the trouble of getting her into Hebrew Union College, she dropped out. Her idea seems to have been to boss Jews—adult Jews—in their temples and holler at them from the pulpit.
Plenty of them are so broken-down that they would not only acquiesce but brag about it. Nowadays you abuse people and then they turn around and take ads in the paper to say how progressive it is to be kicked in the face.”
“Now she’s fallen in love with this Cuban student. Are they still Catholics, under Castro? She books you for a lecture and plays a concert the same night.”
“Not only that,” said Victor. “She has me carry her violin to Chicago for repairs. It’s a valuable instrument, and I have to bring it to Bein and Fushi in the Fine Arts Building. Can’t let it be botched in Buffalo. A Guarnerius.”
“So you met for breakfast?”
“Yes. And then I was taken to meet the boy’s family. He turns out to be a young Archimedes type, a prodigy. They’re refugees, probably on welfare. Fair enough, that among all the criminals the Cubans stuck us with there should be a genius or two….”
“By the way, are you sure he’s such a genius?”
“You can’t go by me. He got a fat four-year scholarship in physiology. His brothers are busboys, if that. And that’s where Nessa is meddling. The mother is in a state.”
“Then she gave you her violin—an errand to do?”
“I accepted to avoid something worse. I paid a fair price for the instrument and by now it’s quintupled in value. I want an appraisal from Bein and Fushi, just in case it enters Nessa’s head to sell the fiddle and buy this Raul from his mother. Elope. Who knows what…. We can go to Bein together.”
More errands for Katrina. Victor had sent Vanessa away to avoid a meeting with his lady friend, his Madame Bovary.
“We can lay the fiddle under a seat. I suppose that leftwing students came to your talk.”
“Why so? I had a bigger crowd than that. The application of The Eighteenth Brumaire_ to American politics and society… the farce of the Second Empire. Very timely.”
“It doesn’t sound too American to me.”
“What, more exotic than Japanese electronics, German automobiles, French cuisine? Or Laotian exiles settled in Kansas?”
Yes, she could see that, and see also how the subject would appear natural to Victor Wulpy from New York, of East Side origin, a street boy, sympathetic to mixed, immigrant and alien America; broadly tolerant of the Cuban boyfriend; exotic himself, with a face like his, and the Greek cap probably manufactured in Taiwan.
Victor had gone on talking. He was telling her now about a note he had received at the hotel from a fellow he had known years ago—a surprise that did not please him. “He takes the tone of an old chum. Wonderful to meet again after thirty years. He happens to be in town. And good old Greenwich Village—I hate the revival of these relationships that never were. Meantime, it’s true, he’s become quite a celebrity.”
“Would I know the name?”
“Larry Wrangel. He had a recent success with a film called The Kronos Factor._ Same type as 2001_ or Star Wars._ “
“Of course,” said Katrina. “That’s the Wrangel who was featured in People_ magazine. A late-in-life success, they called him. Ten years ago he was still making porno movies. Interesting.” She spoke cautiously, having disgraced herself in San Francisco. Even now she couldn’t be sure that Victor had forgiven her for dragging him to see _M*ASH.__ Somewhere in his mental accounts there was a black mark still. Bad taste approaching criminality, he had once said. “He must be very rich. The piece in People_ said that his picture grossed four hundred million. Did he attend your lecture?”
“He wrote that he had an engagement, so he might be a bit late, and could we have a drink afterward. He gave a number, but I didn’t call.”
“You were what—tired? disgruntled?”
“In the old days he was bearable for about ten minutes at a time—just a character who longed to be taken seriously. The type that bores you most when he’s most earnest. He came from the Midwest to study philosophy at NYU and he took up with the painters at the Cedar Bar and the writers on Hudson Street. I remember him, all right—a little guy, quirky, shrewd, offbeat. I think he supported himself by writing continuity for the comic books—Buck Rogers, Batman, Flash Gordon. He carried a scribbler in his zipper jacket and jotted down plot ideas. I lost track of him, and I don’t care to find the track again—Trina, I was disturbed by some discoveries I made about my invitation from the Executives Association.”
“What is this about the Executives?”
“I found out that a guy named Bruce Beidell is the main adviser to the speakers committee, and it turns out that he was the one who set up the invitation, and saw to it that I’d be told. He knows I don’t like him. He’s a rat, an English Department academic who became a culture politician in Washington. In the early Nixon years he built big expectations on Spiro Agnew; he used to tell me that Agnew was always studying serious worthy books, asking him for bigger and better classics. Reading! To read Beidell’s mind you’d need a proctoscope. Suddenly I find that he’ll be on the panel tonight, one of the speakers. And that’s not all. It’s even more curious. The man who will introduce me is Ludwig Felsher. The name won’t mean much to you, but he’s an old old-timer. Before 1917 there was a group of Russian immigrants in the U.S., and Lenin used some of these people after the revolution to do business for him—Armand Hammer types who made ingenious combinations of big money with Communist world politics and became colossally rich. Felsher brought over masterpieces from the Hermitage to raise currency for the Bolsheviks. Duveen and Berenson put in a cheap bid for those treasures.” Victor had been personally offended by Berenson and detested him posthumously.
“So you’re in bad company. You never do like to share the platform.”
He used both hands to move his leg to a more comfortable position. After this effort he was very sharp. “I’ve been among pimps before. I can bear it. But it’s annoying to appear with these pricks. For a few thousand bucks: contemptible. I know this Felsher. From GPU to KGB, and his standing with American capitalists is impeccable. He’s old, puffy bald, red in the face, looks like an unlanced boil. No matter who you are, if you’ve got enough dough you’ll get bear hugs from the chief executive. You’ve made campaign contributions, you carry unofficial messages to Moscow, and you’re hugged in the Oval Office.”
Fretful. Fallen among thieves. That was why he had sent for her, not because he suddenly suspected a metastasis.
“I’ll hate seeing Beidell. Nothing but a fish bladder in his head, and the rest of him all malice and intrigue. Why are these corporation types so dumb?”
Katrina encouraged him to say more. She crossed her booted legs and offered him a listening face. Her chin was supported on bent fingers.
“Under these auspices, I don’t mind telling you my teeth are on edge,” he said.
“But, Victor, you could turn the tables on them all. You could let them have it.”
Naturally he could. If he had a mind to. It would take a lot out of him, though. But he was not one of your (nowadays) neurotic, gutless, conniving intellectual types. From those he curtly dissociated himself. Katrina saw him in two aspects, mainly. In one aspect Victor reminded her comically of the huge bad guy in a silent Chaplin movie, the bully who bent gas lamps in the street to light his cigar and had huge greasepaint eyebrows. At the same time, he was a person of intensest delicacy and of more shadings than she would ever be able to distinguish. More and more often since he became sick, he had been saying that he needed to save his strength for what mattered. And did those executives matter? They didn’t matter a damn. The Chase Manhattan, World Bank, National Security Council connections meant zilch to him, he said. He hadn’t sought them_ out. And it wasn’t as if they didn’t know his views. He had more than once written, on the subject announced for tonight, that true personality was not to be found at the to
p of either hierarchy, East or West. Between them the superpowers had the capacity to kill everybody, but there was no evidence of higher human faculties to be found in the top leadership. On both sides power was in the hands of comedians and pseudopersons. The neglect, abasement, dismissal of art was a primary cause of this degeneration. If Victor were sufficiently fired up, the executives would hear bold and unusual things from him about the valuing of life when it was bound up with the active valuing of art. But he was ailing, ruffled; his mind was tarnished. This was the condition of Victor himself. He was thinking that he shouldn’t even be here. What was he doing here in the Buffalo airport in midwinter? In this lounge? Bound for Chicago? He was not at the exact center of his own experience on days like this. There were sensations which should absolutely be turned off. And he couldn’t do that, either. He felt himself being held hostage by oblique, unidentifiable forces.
He said, “One agreeable recollection I do have of this man Wrangel. He played the fiddle in reverse. Being left-handed, he had the instrument restrung, the sound posts moved. Back then, it was important to have your little specialty. He went a long way, considering the small scale of his ingenuity. Became a big-time illusionist.”
The attendant had brought Katrina a small bottle of Dewar’s. Pouring it, she held the glass to the light to look at the powerful spirit of the spirit, like a spiral, finer than smoke. Then she said, “It may do some good to look at the notes 1 typed for you.”
“Yes, let’s.”
She used reading glasses; Victor had no need of them. In some respects he hadn’t aged at all. For a big man he was graceful, and for an old one he was youthful. Krieggstein might be right, and the excitement of thought did prevent decay—her policeman friend must have overheard this somewhere, or picked it up in the “Feminique” section of the Tribune._ On his own he couldn’t make such observations.
The fixtures in the lounge were like those in the cabin of a plane, and Victor had to hold up the paper to catch the slanted ceiling-light beam. “A quick onceover,” he said. “I don’t expect much. ‘Why people have taken to saying that truth is stranger’—or did I say ‘stronger’?—‘than fiction. Because liberal democracy makes for enfeebled forms of self-consciousness—who was the fellow who said that speaking for himself he would never exchange the public world, for all its harshness and imperfections, for the stuffiness of a private world? Weak self-conceptions, poor fictions. Lack of an Idea._ Collective preemption of Ideas_ by professional groups (lawyers, doctors, engineers). They make a simulacrum of “standards,” and this simulacrum becomes the morality of their profession. All sense of individual cheating disappears. First step toward “stability,” for them, is to cancel individual moral judgments. Leadership can then be assumed by fictional personages.’ “
“Would you say our leaders are fictional personages?” said Katrina.
“Wouldn’t you?”
Victor didn’t look well now. The red in his cheeks was an irritable red, and there were other dangerous signs of distemper. He stared at her in that way he had of seeming, once more, to review her credentials. It was humiliating. But she joined him in his doubts and was sorry for him. It was best for him now to talk. Even when he had to forgo the certainty of being understood. He lowered his head like a bull deciding whether or not to gore, and then he went on talking. She liked it best when his talk was mischievous and mean—when he said that a man had no brain but a fish bladder in his skull. Seriousness was more worrisome, and at present he was being serious. He told Katrina now that he didn’t think these were useful notes. He had said the same things in his Marx lecture and said them better. Marx connected individual wakefulness with class struggle. When social classes found themselves prevented from acting politically, and class struggle fell into abeyance, temporarily, consciousness also became confused—waking, sleeping, dreaming, all mixed up.
Did he still consider himself a Marxist? Katrina wanted to know. She was scared by her own temerity, but even more afraid of being dumb. “I ask because you speak of class struggle. But also because you consider the Communist countries such a failure.”
He said that, well, he had trained his mind on hard Marxist texts in his formative years and was permanently influenced—and why not? After reading The Eighteenth Brumaire_ again, he was convinced that Marx had America’s present number. Here Victor, his leg extended like one of Admiral Nelson’s cannon under wraps, gave a characteristically dazzling glance from beneath the primeval tangle of his brows and said that the Buffalo talk and the Chicago one would be connected. When wage earners, the middle class, the professions, lose track of their true material interests, they step outside history, so to speak, and then non-class interests take over, and when that happens society itself collapses into neuroses. An era of playacting begins. Vast revolutionary changes are concealed by the trivialities of the actors. Clowns and ham actors govern, or seem to. Superficially, it looks like farce. The deeper reality is anything but.
He was such an exceptional being altogether that because of the vast difference (to lesser people, Katrina meant), he himself might strike you as an actor. The interval of serious conversation had made him look more like himself—it had revived him. Katrina now admitted, “I was worried about you, Vic.”
“Why? Because I asked you to come? I’m sore at those guys in Chicago and I wanted to tell you about it. I felt frustrated and depleted.”
He can tell me things he’s too dignified to say otherwise. He can be the child, Katrina concluded. Which not even my own kids will be with me. As a mother I seem to be an artificial product. Would that be because I can’t put any sex into being a mother? She said to Victor, “My guess was that the bleak weather and the travel were getting you down.”
Oh, as for bleakness. Examining her, he established that “bleak” was a different thing for him. Nor did he mean low spirits when he said “depleted.” He wasn’t low, he was higher than he liked, very high, in danger of being disconnected. He was superlucid, which he always wanted to be, but this lucidity had its price: clear ideas becoming ever more clear the more the ground opened under your feet—illumination increasing together with your physiological progress toward death. I never expected to live forever, but neither did I expect this._ And there was no saying what this_ was, precisely. It was both definite and cloudy. And here Katrina gave him support, materially. Katrina, a lady with a full body, sat on her swelling bottom line. She wore a knitted dark-green costume. She had strong legs in black boots. Where the ostrich quills once grew, the surface of the leather was bubbled. Very plain to him in her figure were the great physical forces of the human trunk and the weight of the backswell, the separation of the thighs. The composure of her posture had a whore effect on him—did she know this or not? Was she aware that her neatness made him horny? He kept it from her, so that she had no idea of the attraction of her hands, especially the knuckle folds and the tips of what he called, to himself only, her touch-cock fingers. Katrina was his manifest Eros, this worried, comical lady for whom he had such complex emotions, for the sake of which he put up with so many idiocies, struggled with so many irritations. She could irritate him to the point of heartbreak, so that he asked was it worth it, and why didn’t he spin off this stupid cunt; and couldn’t he spend his old age better, or had his stars run out of influence altogether? He used to be able to take his business where he liked. That pagan availability was closing out. At first, she had been his lump of love. He counted the stages. At first, just fun. The next stage was laughable, as he recognized through her that his erotic epoch might after all be the Victorian, with its special doodads. Then there seemed to be a kind of Baudelairean phase, … tu connais la caresse Qui fait revivre les morts…_
Only he didn’t in fact buy that. His wasn’t an example of clinically disturbed sexuality. He felt detached from all such fancy stuff. She did_ in fact have the touch that brought back the dead—his dead. But there was no witchery or sadic darkness about it. Evidently, whether he liked it or no
t, his was a common sexual type. He was beyond feeling the disgrace of its commonness. She kept him going, and he had to confess that he wouldn’t know what to do at all if he didn’t keep going. Therefore he went flying around. He was not ready to succumb. He paid no more attention to death than to a litter of puppies pulling at the cuffs of his pants.
About bleak winter, he was saying to Katrina, “I have trouble staying warm. I’ve heard that capsicum helps. For the capillaries. Last night was bad. I put my feet in hot water. I had to wear double socks and still was cold.”
“I can take care ofthat.”
Wonderful, what powers women will claim.
“And Vanessa, this morning—what was she like?”
“Well,” he said, “what these kids really want is to make you obey the same powers that they_ have to serve. The older generation, it happens, cooperates with them. The Cuban mother was puzzled. I could read it in her eyes—‘What in hell are you people up_ to?’ “
“Oh, you met her.”
“You bet I did. This morning I was sitting in her kitchen, and the boy was our interpreter. The kid’s IQ must be out of sight. The woman says she has nothing against Vanessa. Nessa has made herself part of the family. She’s moved in on them. She peels potatoes and washes pots. She and the boy don’t go to restaurants and movies because he has no money and won’t let her pay. So they study day and night, and they’re both on the dean’s list. But my daughter is just meddling. She abducted the genius of the family who was supposed to be the salvation of his siblings and his mama.”
“But she says she loves him, and looks at you with those long eyes she inherited from you.”
“She’s a little bitch. I found out that she was giving her mother sex advice. How a modern wife can please a husband better. And you have to find new ways to humor an old man. She told Beila all about some homosexual encyclopedia. She said not to buy it, but gave her the address of a shop where she could read some passages on foreplay.”
