by Bellow, Saul
“There’s no real damage. It just aches some. But, Vic, think of the time lost to eat bad food. Is there nothing we can do to get out of here?”
“I might try to telephone the guy in charge of tonight’s arrangements. Let me look in my wallet.” Hooking his cane over his shoulder, he examined his hip-pocket army-navy billfold. “Yes. Continental Bank. Horace Kinglake. Why don’t we phone him? If he wants me to speak tonight, he’d better organize our rescue. Why don’t you call him, Katrina?”
“You want me to do the talking?”
“Why not? He must have top-level contacts with United or American. I hope you brought your telephone credit card.”
“I did,” said Katrina.
“Airports used to have good central services. Even Grand Central had telephone operators. Let’s see if we can get hold of a phone.” They had just begun to move forward when Victor stopped Katrina, saying, “I see our buddy Wrangel. He’s coming toward us.”
“He’s sure to see us. You’re pretty conspicuous.”
“What if he does?… He did say he was flying to Detroit, didn’t he?”
“When you walked out, I was embarrassed,” said Katrina.
“He had no business to pursue me to the lounge.”
“A different way to view it is that he came all the way from California to hear your lecture and to engage in conversation.”
“To settle an old score, I think. This is a day when events have a dream tendency,” said Victor. “There’s a line about ‘les revenants qui vous raccrochent en plein jour._ ’”
“You’d better give me the card with that Kinglake’s number.”
Victor, curiously, didn’t try to avoid Wrangel, and Wrangel, to Katrina’s surprise, was terribly pleased to find them in the concourse. He might justifiably have been a little huffy. Not at all. In his own shy way he was delighted. “You didn’t say you were going to Detroit, too.”
“We weren’t. We’re grounded by the bad weather in Chicago.”
“Oh, you have to wait. In that case why don’t you have lunch with me?”
“I wish we could,” said Katrina. “But we have to get to a telephone. It’s urgent.”
“Phoning would be much easier from a restaurant. Just a minute ago I passed a decent-looking bar and grill.”
It was a big dark place, under a low ceiling, Tudor decor. As soon as the hostess appeared, Katrina saw money changing hands. It looked like a ten-dollar bill that Wrangel slipped the woman. Why not, if The Kronos Factor_ had grossed four hundred million? A leather booth was instantly available. Victor occupied the corner, laying his leg along the settee on the left. “Shall we drink?” said Wrangel. “Shall we order before you make your call? Miss,” he said to the hostess, “please let this lady use your telephone. What shall we get for you, my dear?”
“A turkey sandwich, white meat, on toast.”
“Duck р l’orange,” said Victor. In a lounge as dark as this, where you couldn’t see what you were eating, Katrina would have chosen a simpler meal for him as well. Amber light descended from a fixture upon Wrangel’s head and on the thick white furs.
“Better make that call person-to-person,” Victor advised Katrina.
It was good advice, for Horace Kinglake was hard to reach. The call went through many transfers. By his voice when he said “Kinglake,” she recognized that he was an adroit, managerial type. From Victor she had picked up a certain contempt for polished executives. Still, it was comforting to talk even to a man whose courtesies were artificial. “Stuck in Detroit? Oh, we can’t have that, can we? Some two hundred acceptances have come in. An audience from all parts of the country. It would be a disaster if Mr. Wulpy… I am really concerned. And so sorry. Wasn’t there an earlier flight?” Cursing Victor, probably, for this last-minute fuck-up.
“Is the Chicago weather so ferocious?” Katrina asked for facts to go with her forebodings.
But Mr. Kinglake was taking her call in a private dining room, and what would a senior executive in his seventieth-story offices know about weather in the streets? He had heard some reports of a freak storm. “We’ll get Mr. Wulpy here, regardless. I’ll put my ace troubleshooter on this. Give me about half an hour.”
“You can reach us at this number in Detroit…. I wonder, is O’Hare closed down for the day?”
“There is Midway and also Meigs Field.”
Half reassured, she went back to the booth. A woman in her position, taking chances, playing outlaw in order to be at Victor’s side—the big man’s consort; but when she had seen him in profile ( just after the flight engineer had stomped her instep, and when she had felt that there were unsobbed sobs in her chest), she had had a new view of the deterioration he had suffered since he had taken up with her.
The double shot of booze he had drunk apparently had done him good. He held a thick wide glass in his hand—a refill. This was what his system needed, food and drink and a booth to rest in. He could well have afforded to bring her here himself, and to slip the hostess ten bucks and to have the use of the telephone. But he would never have done that. It would have been a sacrifice of principle. And this was why he had been glad to see Wrangel. Wrangel had got him off his feet. The duck р l’orange would be awful. A servitor, an aide, was necessary to satisfy his psyche. Also somebody to pick up the tab. She admitted that this was important to him.
Trina made her report, and Victor said, “Well, we can just take it easy until he calls back. I’ll talk to him myself, about tonight’s program. Sit down, kid, and have a drink.” Katrina shared the corner beside him. Vanessa’s fiddle stood upright behind them. Katrina was grateful to Wrangel just then. She needed help with Victor. He seemed to her unstable, off center. The term often used in Psychology Today_ was “labile.” He was labile. And he was more pleased than not to have Wrangel’s company now. He seemed to have forgotten the poisonous dig about Tchelitchew. Katrina thought it likely that Wrangel had never heard about Tchelitchew’s offensive statement. Of course, Victor believed that movies of the kind made by Wrangel infected the mental life of the country (and the international community), but they weren’t considering Wrangel’s movies just now. Evidently, though, they had been talking about erotic films, for Wrangel was saying that he hadn’t personally been involved in that business. “Productions ofthat kind don’t need scriptwriters.”
“No?” said Victor. “Just interracial couples balling away?”
“I wonder if you can get the waitress to bring me a Bloody Mary,” said Katrina.
“Certainly,” said Wrangel. “Now, to fill you in on my career since the Village days, I had many kinds of writing jobs. One of the more curious was with the crew in Texas that helped to put together the memoirs of President Johnson.
“How did that come about?” said Katrina.
“Out of the Bread Loaf Conference, where I met some Washington journalists. Also Robert Frost—and a few gentleman types from Harvard. And I was recommended by Dick Goodwin, so there I was in Austin on Johnson’s staff of writers. He had retired by then.”
“How was that done—the work?” said Victor.
“It began with a course of brainwashing. We used to gather atop the Federal Building in Austin built by LBJ toward the end of his administration. He had his own suite, and he landed by helicopter, from his ranch, and came down from the rooftop to spend the day with us. He repeated his version of every event until it was grafted on our minds. You often come across these legend builders who hypnotize you by repetition. You become the receptacle of their story. Robert Frost was another of those authorized-version fellows. They do all of the talking, and they repeat themselves until your mind begins to reject alternative versions. Johnson brought us to his ranch, too. He drove over the pastures in his Lincoln, and the bodyguards followed in their Lincoln. When he needed more to drink, he rolled down his window and the guards pulled up alongside and poured him more whiskey. Most of us were intimidated by him—easier to do with a person like me, Victor, than with you.”
“Oh, it’s been tried. Once at Berenson’s villa. The famous mummy was brought out—another Litvak, like myself. I was raised to respect my elders, but I didn’t care to have so many cultural flourishes made over me.”
“The Latin quotations…” Katrina reminded him.
“The lacrimae rerum. _ Wow! If it could have been done by ass-kissing his patrons and patronesses, B. B. would have dried away a good many tears. Then he said that he understood I was a considerable person in the bohemian life of New York. And I said that to call me a bohemian was like describing John the Baptist as a hydrotherapist. I had hoped to get the discussion around to modern painting, but of course that never happened.”
A friendly chat. It was now half past two. At noon Katrina had been afraid that Victor might hit Wrangel on the head with his stick for saying “Most ideas are trivial.” How well they were getting along now.
“You didn’t mean that you were any kind of John the Baptist?” said Wrangel.
“No, it just drove me wild to be patronized.”
For the moment, Victor was being charming. “Most people know better than to lack charm,” he had once told Katrina. “Even harsh people have their own harsh charm. Some are all_ charm, like Franklin D. Roosevelt. Some repudiate all charm, like Stalin. When all-charm and no-charm met at Yalta, no-charm won hands down.” Victor in his heart of hearts dismissed charm. Style, yes; style was essential; but charm tended to blur your thoughts. And if Victor was now charming with Wrangel, joking about John the Baptist, it was because he wanted to prevent Wrangel from bringing out his Gucci appointment book with its topic sentences on The Eighteenth Brumaire._
It was plainly Wrangel’s purpose to resume—to develop a serious conversation. It was the drive for serious conversation that had made him cross the continent from L. A. to Buffalo. Trina was beginning to see a certain efficiency and toughness in Wrangel. It was not by accident that he had earned so many millions. While he seemed “humbly happy” in Victor’s company, he was also opinionated, obstinate. In the past, and even today, Victor had dismissed him—not a mind of the A category—and Wrangel was determined to win a higher rating. He thought he deserved it. That was Katrinas view. The shy, astute man in the arctic fox coat had Victor Wulpy to himself—a failing Victor, but Wrangel would not know that, since Victor carried himself so firmly, and after a few slugs of Scotch he sat up as princely as ever. He was, however, very far from himself. He was in one of those badly lighted (on purpose) no-man’s-land restaurants that airports specialize in; he had eaten all the sesame sticks and crackers on the table, and when he put one of his hands under the back of Katrina’s sweater she felt an icy pang through her silk slip.
The food was served just as Victor was called to the phone, and Wrangel asked the waiter to take it back to the kitchen and keep it warm.
Tilting to the right to avoid the hanging ornaments, fixtures with gilt chains, Victor followed the hostess to the telephone.
“Do you know,” said Katrina, partly to forestall a conversation about Victor, “I was interested to hear that you started out by inventing plots for science comics. You must be very quick at it. I’ve been trying and trying to do a children’s story about an elephant stuck on the top floor of a Chicago department store, and you have no idea how it drags and bothers me. When the animal was taken up in the freight elevator, she tested the floor, and she was reluctant to trust it. Her mahout—the trainer—sweet-talked her into it. She was a great success in the store, but when it came time to go down and she tested the elevator again with her foot, she wouldn’t enter.”
“They’re stuck with her? How to get her out?” He gave one of his intense but restricted smiles. “What have you thought of?”
“Piano movers; the fire department; drugging the elephant; hypnotism; dismantling a wall; a wooden ramp down the staircase.”
“A builders’ crane?” said Wrangel.
“Sure, but the roof would have to be opened.”
“Of course it would. Even if there were a hatch. But look here—suppose they braced the floor of the elevator from beneath. Temporary steel beams. She goes in. Maybe some person she trusts is inside and gives her hay mixed with marshmallows while the supports are being removed by mechanic commandos at top speed. So they get her down and parade her on Michigan Boulevard.”
“Oh, that’s a perfectly angelic solution!” said Katrina.
“As long as the floor is firm when she tests it.”
“Fabulous! Do elephants have a weakness for marshmallows? You are a wizard plotter. I think I may be able to handle it now. Totally inexperienced, you see.’
“I’d be only too happy to help. If you get stuck, this card of mine has all the numbers where I can be reached.”
“That’s awfully decent. Thanks.”
“And it’s a very bright idea for a kids’ book. Charming. I hope it goes over big.”
Trina for a moment considered telling him what a difference an independent success would make to her. He looked now, despite his own success and celebrity, like a man who had had very bad times, ugly defeats, choking disappointments, and so she was tempted to talk openly to him. It would bring some light and warmth into this dark frozen day, some emotional truth. But it wouldn’t be prudent to open up. He had helped with the elephant. However, there was Victor to think of. This Wrangel might be eager to make use of what she would tell him about herself to obtain privileged knowledge of Victor, for which he perhaps had an unusual, a ravenous, a kinky appetite.
“Victor is a marvelous man,” said Wrangel. “I always admired him enormously. I was just a kid when I met him, and he couldn’t possibly take me seriously. For a long time I’ve had a relationship to him of which he couldn’t be aware. I made a study of him, you see. I’ve put a tremendous lot of thought into him. I’m afraid I have to confess that he’s been an obsession. I’ve read all his books, collected his articles.”
“He thinks you came East on purpose, to talk to him.”
“It’s true, and I’m not surprised that he guessed it. He was sick last year, wasn’t he?”
“Near death.”
“I can see he’s not his old self.”
“I hope you don’t have some idea about straightening out his thinking, Mr. Wrangel.”
“Who, me? Do I think he’d listen to me?_ I know better than that.”
“And I don’t want you to think that if you tell me your opinions I’m going to transmit them.”
“Why would I do that? It would be just as easy to send him my opinions in writing. Believe it or not, Miss Gallagher, it’s more a matter of affection.”
“Although you haven’t even seen him in thirty years?”
“The psyche has a different calendar,” he said. “Anyway, you haven’t got it quite right. Anybody who knows Victor naturally wants to talk about him. There’s so much to him.”
“There are a hundred people you could discuss him with—the famous painters he influenced, or types like Clement Greenberg or Kenneth Burke or Harold Rosenberg—or any of the big-time art theorists. Plus a whole regiment of other people’s wives.”
“You must be a musician, Miss Gallagher. You carry a violin.”
“It belongs to Victor’s youngest daughter and we’re taking it to Chicago for repair. If I were a violinist, why would I write a story about an elephant? I understand that you used to fiddle yourself.”
“Did Victor remember my left-handed fooling—my trick instrument?”
“Anyway, what were you going to say about Victor, Mr. Wrangel?”
“Victor was meant to be a great man. Very, very smart. A powerful mind. A subtle mind. Completely independent. Not really a Marxist, either. I went to visit Sidney Hook last week, who used to be my teacher at NYU, and we were talking about the radicals of the older generation in New York. Sidney pooh-poohed them. They never had been serious, never organized themselves to take control as the European left did. They were happy enough, talking. Talk about Lenin, talk about Rosa Luxemburg
, or German fascism, or the Popular Front, or Lщon Blum, or Trotsky’s interpretation of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, or about James Burnham or whomever. They spent their lives discussing everything. If they felt their ideas were correct, they were satisfied. They were a bunch of mental hummingbirds. The flowers were certainly red, but there couldn’t have been any nectar in them. Still, it was enough if they were very ingenious, and if they drew a big, big picture—the very biggest picture. Now apply this to what Victor said one plane hop back, in Buffalo, that it takes a serious political life to keep reality real….”
Katrina pretended that he was saying this to the wrong party. “I don’t have any theoretical ability at all,” she said, and she bent toward him as if to call attention to her forehead, which couldn’t possibly have had real thoughts behind it. She was the farmer’s daughter who couldn’t remember how many made a dozen. But she saw from Wrangel’s silent laugh—his skin was so taut, had he or hadn’t he had a face-lift in California?—saw from the genial scoff lines around his mouth that she wasn’t fooling him for a minute.
“Victor was one of those writers who took command of a lot of painters, told them what they were doing, what they should do. Society didn’t care about art anyway, it was busy with other things, and art became the plaything of intellectuals. Real painters, real painting, those are very rare. There are masses of educated people, and they’ll tell you that they’re all for poetry, philosophy, or painting, but they don’t know them, don’t do them, don’t really care about them, sacrifice nothing for them, and really can’t spare them the time of day—can’t read, can’t see, and can’t hear. Their real interests are commercial, professional, political, sexual, financial. They don’t live by art, with art, through art. But they’re willing in a way to be imposed upon, and that’s what the pundits do. They do it to the artists as well. The brush people are led by the word people. It’s like some General Booth with a big brass band leading artists to an abstract heaven.”
