by Saul Bellow
“Where’re you living now?” I said.
“On the Near North Side,” he said, brushing this off, that I wanted to know definite things about him. He wasn’t going to say whether there was a sink in his room, or carpet or linoleum, or whether he was on a car line or facing a wall. It’s normal for me to have such curiosity about details. But he wasn’t going to satisfy this curiosity, since to dwell on such things implied it would be hard to get away from them; for him they were things to pass quickly. “I’m not going to stay there,” he said.
“What have you been living on?” I asked. “What are you doing?”
“What do you mean, living on?” He threw difficulties in my way by repeating questions. He stood too much on his pride to say how things were and show what a bad rip he had gotten in his stuff. A kind of gallantry of presentation he had always had in the quality of older brother he wouldn’t give up. He had been a fool and done wrong, he showed up sallow and with the smaller disgrace that he was fat, as if overeating were his reply to being crushed—and with this all over him he wasn’t going to tell me, he balked at telling, some small details. He took my asking as a blow at him while he was trying to climb out of the hole of mortification, and he warded it off with a stiff arm, saying, “What do you mean?” as if he’d remember later I had tried to hit him or at least goad him. Later he didn’t mind telling me that he had washed floors in a beanery, but this was long afterward. But now he fought this off. Loaded on the hard black armchair—I put it that way because of his increased bulk—he passionately pulled together his nerves and energies—I could see him concentrate and do it—and he started to deal with me. He did it more strongly than was necessary, with pasha force. “I haven’t been wasting my time,” he said. “I’ve been working on something. I think I’m getting married soon,” he said, and didn’t allow himself to smile with the announcement or temper it in some pleasant way.
“When? To whom?”
“To a woman with money.”
“A woman? An older woman?” That was how I interpreted it.
“Well, what’s the matter with you? Yes, I’d marry an older woman. Why not?”
“I bet you wouldn’t.” He was still able to amaze me, as though we had remained kids.
“We don’t have to argue about it because she’s not old. She’s about twenty-two, I’m told.”
“By whom? And you haven’t even seen her?”
“No, I haven’t seen her. You remember the buyer, my old boss? He’s fixing me up. I have her picture. She’s not bad. Heavy—but I’m getting heavy too. She’s sort of pretty. Anyhow, even if she weren’t pretty, and if the buyer isn’t lying about the dough—her family is supposed to have a mountain of dough—I’d marry her.”
“You’ve already made up your mind?”
“I’ll say I have!”
“And suppose she doesn’t want you?”
“I’ll see that she does. Don’t you think I can?”
“Maybe you can, but I don’t like it. It’s cold-blooded.”
“Cold-blooded!” he said with sudden emotion. “What’s cold-blooded about it? I’d be cold-blooded if I stayed as I am. I see around this marriage and beyond it. I’ll never again go for all the nonsense about marriage. Everybody you lay eyes on, except perhaps a few like you and me, is born of marriage. Do you see anything so exceptional or wonderful about it that makes it such a big deal? Why be fooling around to make this perfect great marriage? What’s it going to save you from? Has it saved anybody—the jerks, the fools, the morons, the schleppers, the jag-offs, the monkeys, rats, rabbits, or the decent unhappy people or what you call nice people? They’re all married or are born of marriages, so how can you pretend to me that it makes a difference that Bob loves Mary who marries Jerry? That’s for the movies. Don’t you see people pondering how to marry for love and getting the blood gypped out of them? Because while they’re looking for the best there is—and I figure that’s what’s wrong with you—everything else gets lost. It’s sad, it’s a pity, but it’s that way.”
I was all the same strongly against him; that he saw. Even if I couldn’t just then consider myself on the active list of lovers and wasn’t carrying a live torch any more for Esther Fenchel. I recognized his face as the face of a man in the wrong. I thought there was too much noise of life around him for a right decision to be made. Furthermore, the books I had been reading—I noticed that Simon was aware of their contribution to my opposition and his eye marked them as opponents, and there was a little bit of derision in his glance too. But I couldn’t deny or be disloyal to, at the first hard blink of a challenger or because of derision, things I took seriously and consented to in my private soul as I sat reading.
“What do you want me to agree with you for? If you believe what you’re saying, it shouldn’t make any difference whether I agree or not.”
“Oh hell!” he said, sitting forward and looking into me with widened eyes. “Don’t flatter yourself, kid. If you really understood you’d agree. That would be nice, but I can certainly get along without if I have to. And besides, though this may not flatter either of us, we’re the same and want the same. So you understand.”
I wasn’t of that opinion, and not from pride; only because of the facts. Seeing that he needed me to be similar, however, I kept quiet. And if he was talking about the mysterious part of parentage, that our organs could receive waves or quanta of the same length, I didn’t know enough about it to differ with him.
“Well, maybe it’s as you say. But what makes you think this girl and her family are going to want you?”
“What are my assets? Well, first of all we’re all handsome men in our family. Even George, if he were normal, would have been. The old lady knew that and thought we’d capitalize on it. But besides, I’m not marrying a rich girl in order to live on her dough and have a good time. They’ll get full value out of me, those people. They’ll see that I won’t lie down and take it easy. I can’t. I have to make money. I’m not one of those guys that give up what they want as soon as they realize they want it. I want money, and I mean want; and I can handle it. Those are my assets. So I couldn’t be more on the level with them.”
You couldn’t blame me for listening to this with some amount of skepticism. But then things like this are done by people with the specific ambition to do them. I didn’t like the way he talked; for instance, the boast that we were handsome men—it made us sound like studs. However, I couldn’t hope that he’d have another failure; he wasn’t that rich in heart that he could make good use of it.
“Let’s see the girl’s picture.”
He had it in his pants pocket. She seemed young enough, a big girl, with a pretty good face. I thought she was rather handsome, though not of an open or easy nature.
“She’s attractive, I told you. A little too heavy maybe.”
Her name was Charlotte Magnus.
“Magnus? Wasn’t it a Magnus truck that delivered coal to the Einhorns?”
“That’s her uncle, in the coal business. Four or five big yards. And her father owns property by the acre. Hotels. Also a few five-and-dime stores. It’ll be the coal business for me. That’s where I think the most dough is. I’ll ask for a yard as a wedding present.”
“You have it all pretty well figured out.”
“Sure. I have something figured out for you too.”
“What, am I supposed to get married also?”
“In time, yes, we’ll fix you up. Meanwhile you have to help me out. I have to have some family. I’ve been told they’re family-minded people. They wouldn’t understand or like it, the way we are, and we have to make it look better. There’ll be dinners and such things, and probably a big engagement party. You don’t expect me to go downstate and fetch George here to show them, do you? No, I have to have you. We need clothes. Do you have any?”
“They’re in hock.”
“Get them out.”
“And what am I going to use for money?”
“Don’t you ha
ve any at all? I thought you were in some kind of book business here.”
“Mama gets all the money I have to spare.”
He said tightly, “All right, don’t be wise. I’ll take care of all that soon. I’ll raise the dough.”
I wondered where his credit might still be good. Perhaps his buyer friend lent him some money. Anyway, I got a postal order from Simon a few days later, and when I redeemed the clothes he came to borrow one of my Evanston suits. Soon he said that he had met Charlotte Magnus. He believed she was already in love with him.
Chapter 11
NOW THERE’S A DARK Westminster of a time when a multitude of objects cannot be clear; they’re too dense and there’s an island rain, North Sea lightlessness, the vein of the Thames. That darkness in which resolutions have to be made—it isn’t merely local; it’s the same darkness that exists in the fiercest clearnesses of torrid Messina. And what about the coldness of the rain? That doesn’t deheat foolishness in its residence of the human face, nor take away deception nor change defects, but this rain is an emblem of the shared condition of all. It maybe means that what is needed to mitigate the foolishness or dissolve the deception is always superabundantly about and insistently offered to us—a black offer in Charing Cross; a gray in Place Pereires where you see so many kinds and varieties of beings go to and fro in the liquid and fog; a brown in the straight unity of Wabash Avenue. With the dark, the solvent is in this way offered until the time when one thing is determined and the offers, mercies, and opportunities are finished.
The house where I was living on the South Side was a student house within range of the university chimes and chapel bell when the evenings were still, and it had a crowded medieval fullness, besides, of hosts inside the narrow walls, faces in every window, every inch occupied. I had some student book customers and even several friends here. In fact I really knew everybody through the circumstance that Owens, the old Welshman who operated the place, had me answering telephone calls and distributing the mail in the little varnished hole called the lobby. This I did in exchange for my rent. And as I sorted the letters I unavoidably read return addresses and postcards, and, signaling by bell to call people to the telephone, I had to hear their conversations since there was no booth. Owens too listened in, he and his spinster sister who was housekeeper; the door of their stale parlor was always open—the smell of the kitchen governed over all the other smells of the house—where I at my post in the wicker rocker two hours every evening could see their after-supper state, their square pillars of walnut, the madnesses of starched lace, the insects’-eye inspiration of cut-glass, the screwy detail of fern both fiddle-necked and expanded, the paintings of fruit, which were full of hardness against liberty, plus the wheels of blue dishes around the wainscoting. With such equipment making an arsenal of their views—I mustn’t forget the big fixtures of buffalo glass hanging on three chains—they demonstrated how they were there to stay and endure. Their tenants were transient, hence the Owenses probably needed something like this to establish home for themselves, and it was made very heavy.
Clem Tambow took to visiting me. His father the old politician had died, and Clem and his brother, now a tap dancer on the Loew’s circuit, had divided an insurance policy. Clem wouldn’t say how much he had inherited, out of a queer personal niceness or privacy, or maybe from superstition. But he had registered at the university, in the psychology department, and was living in the neighborhood.
“What do you think of the old man leaving me money?” he said, laughing, shy of his big mouth and carious teeth—he still had the big clear whites of his eyes and his head furry at the back as when a boy; and he went on confessing the trouble of his ugliness to me, being somber about the grief of his nose, but interrupting his complaints with enormous laughs, suddenly and swiftly moving his hand to save his cigar from falling. Now that he had money he wore a row of Perfecto Queens in his coat.
“I didn’t appreciate my old man enough. I was all-out for my mother. I mean out. I would be still, but now she’s just plain too old. Can’t kid myself about it any more, especially since I’ve read a few psychology books.”
Speaking of psychology, he always laughed. He said, “I’m only on campus because of the pussy.” And then, a little melancholy, “I have some dough now, so I may as well harvest. I wouldn’t get anywhere otherwise, with this fish mouth and my nose. Educated girls, you can appeal to their minds, and they don’t expect you to spend too much on them.” He couldn’t consider himself a student; he was a sort of fee-paying visitor; he played poker in the law-school basement and pool at the Reynold’s Club and went to a handbook on Fifty-third Street to bet on horses. If he attended a class he was apt to “haw-haw-haw” in the big lecture hall at Kent, the amphitheater, at any standard joke of the science, or from private fun, unpreventably.
“But,” he would explain, “that dumbbell was trying to put over some behaviorist junk, that all thinking is in words and so it must take place partly in the throat, in the vocal cords—what he said was ‘inhibited sub-vocalization.’ So they got curious as to what happened with mutes, and got some and put dinguses on their necks and read them syllogisms. But all the stuff was escaping through the fingers, because of course they talk with their hands. Then they poured plaster casts on their hands. Well, when the guy got this far I started laughing—haw-haw! And he asked me to leave.”
Clem said this with one of his convulsions of embarrassment and shyness which then was wiped out by further laughter. Haw-haw-haw! Then a big flush of delight. Then gloom again, as he recalled his troubles, his having been shortweighed as to gifts by nature. I tried to tell him that he was wrong and that he didn’t need to make up for anything. It was his ramming time, and his appearance was strongly virile in spite of exaggerations, such as his mustache, the gambler’s stripe of the $22.50 suits he bought on time—he had the money but he preferred to pay installments. He said, “Don’t be nice to me, Augie. You don’t have to.” Sometimes he took the air toward me of an uncle with a nephew of nearly the same age. He sought middle-agedness. He had decided that he could appeal to women whose taste was for experience; a little worn, somewhat bitter, debauched uncle. And that was how he tried to play it.
“Well, what about you, Augie, what’s the matter with you?” he said. “What are you slopping around here for? You’ve got more possibilities than you know what to do with. The trouble with you is that you’re looking for a manager. Now you’re in cahoots with this Mexican. What are you postponing everything for?”
“What’s everything?”
“I don’t know. But you lie here in a wicker chair, taking it easy, holding a book on your chest, and letting time go by when there are a thousand things you could do.”
Clem had a vast idea of what things there were to be had, which was quite natural when you consider how it wounded and stung him to believe that they were out of his reach. He meant, I know, money, admiration, women made absolutely helpless before you by love. The goods of fortune. He was disturbed by these thousand things, and, sometimes, so was I. He insisted that I should be going somewhere, at least that I should be practicing how to go, that I should concentrate on how to be necessary, and not be backward but energetic, absolute, and so forth. And of course I had some restlessness to be taken up into something greater than myself. I could not shine the star of great individuality that, by absorbed stoking, became a sun of the world over a throng to whom it glitters—whom it doesn’t necessarily warm but only showers down a Plutarch radiance. Being necessary, yes, that would be fine and wonderful; but being Phoebus’s boy? I couldn’t even dream of it. I never tried to exceed my constitution. In any case, when someone like Clem urged me and praised me, I didn’t listen closely. I had my own counseling system. It wasn’t infallible, but it made mistakes such as I could bear.
Clem wasn’t fooling with me on this great topic, but it wasn’t his main purpose to talk to me when he came to the house. He wasn’t there to hop me up or tell me news about Jimmy Klein,
who was already married, and the father of a child, and working in a department store; or about his brother’s trying to get on Broadway big-time. He came because he was after a girl named Mimi Villars who lived in the house.
Mimi wasn’t a student; she waited on tables in a student hash-house on Ellis Avenue. I had noted her with appreciation, maybe the more fit to judge because I had no thought of making her myself. She was very fair and ruddy, of a push-faced tough beauty, long brows continued in very thin pencil slightly upward, like the lash of the euglena, away from their natural line toward tight blond ears that had to be looked for amid her curls, and a large mouth, speaking for a soul of wild appetite, nothing barred; she’d say anything, and had no idea of what could hinder her. Her hips were long and narrow, her bust was large, and she wore close-fitting skirts and sweaters and high heels that gave a tight arch of impatience to the muscles of her calves; her step was small and pretty and her laughter violent, total, and critical. She didn’t much remind me of Willa from the Symington, also a waitress. Willa, whom I preferred personally, this country girl—I think I could have been perfectly happy with Willa and lived all my life in a country town if the chance had ever presented itself. Or, anyhow, I sometimes tell myself that.
