by Saul Bellow
Mimi came from Los Angeles. Her father had been an actor in the silent movies. She’d speak of him when she wanted to say how she hated Englishmen. Originally she came to Chicago to study, but she was expelled from the university for going past the bounds of necking at Greene Hall, in the lounge. She was a natural for being bounced. You wouldn’t doubt that she was capable of the offense, if it was one, and as for the penalty, it was a favorite subject of her ferocious humor.
I knew that Clem didn’t stand a chance with her. The cause of her strong color was not sheer health or self-excitement: love also contributed to it. By a coincidence her lover was one of the customers Padilla had passed on to me, a man named Hooker Frazer who was a graduate assistant in Political Science. He was hard to deal with, for he ordered rare and out-of-print books. Two volumes of Nietzsche’s Will to Power I had a hell of a time swiping, for they were in a closed case at the Economy Book Store; I also got him Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, as well as the last volumes of Capital from the Communist bookshop on Division Street, Herzen’s Autobiography, and some de Tocqueville. He bargained keenly, just as he spoke keenly, with unusual concision, and he was a man the university ought to have been pleased about, with his tall, free look of intelligence early crow-footed from the practice of consideration, a young Calhoun or statesman already, with clear blue spaces indicative of rigorous consistency and an untimely wrinkle, like the writing of a seismograph. He was not one of those tall men of whom you think that they must come in sections of different mechanical principle, but was not awkward although his posture was loose. The fact that he lived in Burton Court, so much like a new Christ Church or Magdalen, and in a don’s state, that learned bachelorhood, itself fetched me. It didn’t Padilla, with his stiff nose of Gizeh’s mummy and livid eye-patches, his narrow vault of shoulders and back, and his hard, sharp step on the getting-to-be-venerable stones. Manny came from a high mountain slum and had a cultureless disposition. He didn’t go in for the Old World much.
But Hooker Frazer was Mimi Villars’ man, and, seeing them together on the stairs of Owens’ house, I admired them, both made so well, she hard and spirited, editing her words for no one, and he so distinct-looking he might have been lineally direct from Cro-Magnon man—but of course with present-day differences, including the disorders. He had a temper that didn’t go with the rest of him, with his composure and even toploftiness. His teeth were often set hard, and his straight nose ended in a nervous fancifulness that must have originated in character rather than inheritance. But even Padilla, who didn’t like him much, said he was muy hombre, a considerable man. Padilla was, however, down on him for his condescension to us; to me more than to him, for Frazer was aware that Padilla was a genius at mathematical physics. But he called us both “mister,” as though he were a West Pointer, and treated us like amusing thieves. As if he wasn’t a receiver of stolen goods himself. He’d say, “Mr. March, will you take a trip downtown and expropriate from the expropriators a good copy of the Esprit des Lois? The other day I noticed one at the Argus.” I’d laugh out loud at his mixture of pompousness and revolutionist’s jargon and his amended Tennessee accent. At first he seemed to consider me an agreeable nitwit and joshed me about my color. “Anybody would say that you spent your days in the cow pasture, Mr. March, from your rosiness, instead of breathing the air of bookshops.” Later he was more grave with me and offered me old copies of Communist and Trotskyist papers and magazines—he had them in stacks, sheaves, and bundles in his room, in various languages; he received all kinds of journals and bulletins. He even invited me once to hear him lecture, but that may have been because I was his cheap source of supply; I extended him credit, and he wanted to stay on good terms with me. Padilla threw fits when he heard that I gave him books on the cuff; I thought he would haul off and punch me with his skinny, long-fingered fist; he screamed at me, “Bobo!” and “you gringo dummy!” And I said I’d stop Frazer’s credit at twenty-five dollars. It was a lie to calm him; he was already into me for nearer to forty. “Shit! I wouldn’t give him a penny. This is just the way he shows he’s better than you,” Manny said. But I wasn’t affected. Probably I too much enjoyed delivering a few books to Frazer for the chance of spending half an hour in the atmosphere of his rooms and hearing him talk. Often I stole two copies of what he ordered, from curiosity, to read one myself, and thus had some dull and difficult afternoons.
I never blamed myself for throwing aside such things as didn’t let themselves be read with fervor, for they left nothing with me anyhow, and I took my cue from Padilla not to vex myself about what didn’t come easy. After all, I wasn’t yet in any special business, but merely trying various things on.
But I had to tell Clem that he wouldn’t get anywhere with Mimi Villars.
“Why,” he said, “because I’m so homely? I figure her for the kind that doesn’t care about looks. She’s a hot girl.”
“Your looks have nothing to do with it. She has a man already.”
“What, and you think she’ll never have another one? That’s how much you know.”
So he backed his belief about her stubbornly, and came to sit with me, washed and fresh-shaved, long black shoes gleaming, and acted with his depressed gallantry, practicing it even on me, lacking only laces and swords to be a follower of decayed Stuarts in exile—his heavy drama of boredom. Only his unlicked electric fur of boyish back-hair and the soft glossiness of his eye whites and his haw-haw! told a different story about him. I was glad of his company. But of course I couldn’t tell him all I knew about Mimi. It wasn’t only that I read postcards and couldn’t help listening to telephone conversations; it was that Mimi didn’t care about secrecy. She led a proclaimed life, and once she got talking she held back nothing. Frazer would occasionally send her a card breaking a date, and she would go into a temper, flinging it away, and say to me furiously, tearing open the clasp of her purse, “Sell me a slug”; and to him on the phone she’d say, “You yellow bastard, can’t you call me and tell me why you won’t come? Don’t give me any of that old crap about working on your thesis! What were you doing on Fifty-seventh Street the other night with those fat goofs when you were supposed to be working on it? Who are they? One of them was an English fairy, I could spot him a mile away. Don’t tell me I don’t understand. I’m tired of your bullshit, you preacher!”
In her breathers, I could hear his voice going on measuredly as I sprawled and listened in the rocker. And then Owens’ beefy wrist would come out to fetch the door and slam it. He didn’t care what tenants did in their rooms, but he didn’t like her swearing to reach his parlor—he was sitting in there on his leather, crunching like dry snow; his main sounds were, at close range, breathing, and, at a distance, turning his weight. “You’ll never live to hear me beg for anything,” were Mimi’s last words to Frazer, and when she slammed phone and hook together with cruelty it was as a musician might shut the piano after he had finished storming chords of mightiest difficulty without a single flinch or error.
To rip off a piece of lover’s temper was pleasure in her deepest vein of enjoyment. She said to me then, “If that bastard calls back, tell him I ran out of the house swearing.” However, she would be waiting for his next call.
What made me sure, though, that she would have no interest in Clem, at least for the time being, was that lately Frazer had been phoning with regularity, and she took her time about descending when I buzzed her. He, knowing it was I that answered the phone, said, “Can’t you get her to make it a little faster, Mr. March?” To which I said, “I can try, but I’m not King Canute, you know,” and let the big club of the receiver hang from the cord.
“What do you want?” were her first words when she laid her burning cigarette on the instrument box. “I can’t talk to you. I’m stymied. If you want to find out how I am you can come over in person and ask.” And then in her joyful, reckless way of welcoming her anger, “All right, if you don’t care, I don’t care either. No, I haven’t come around yet, but don’t worr
y, you won’t have to marry me. I wouldn’t marry a man who doesn’t know what love is. You don’t want a wife, you want a looking glass. What! What do you mean, money! You still owe me forty-seven dollars. That’s okay. I don’t care what it was spent for. If I’m up the stump I’ll take care of it myself. Sure you owe everybody. Don’t give me that kind of stuff. Tell it to your wife. She seems to swallow everything.”
Frazer was not yet divorced from his first wife, from whom Mimi, in her version of it, had rescued him. “Do you remember a picture called The Island of Dr. Moreau? This mad scientist made men and women out of animals? And they called the laboratory ‘The House of Pain’? Well, with his wife he was living like one of those animals,” she once told me, speaking of how she had first found him. “This girl had a flat—you wouldn’t believe a man like Hooker could live in it; no matter what I think of his personality, he’s intelligent, he has ideas; when he was a Communist he was chosen to go study at the Lenin Institute, where they train national leaders like Cachin and Mao; he didn’t make it because he was expelled over the German question. Well, in this flat there were chenille rugs in the toilet so you felt you were doing wrong, going in your shoes. A man can’t do anything while putting up with that. Women really are no good, Augie,” she declared with her characteristic and favorite humorous rage. “They’re no fucking good. They want a man in the house. Just there, in the house. Sitting in his chair. They pretend to take what he thinks and says seriously. Is it about government? Is it about astronomy? So they play along and make believe they care about parties and stars. They baby men, and they don’t care what game they play, just so there’s a man in the house. If the husband is a Socialist, she’s a Socialist, hotter than he, and if he changes into a Technocrat she beats him to it—she makes him think so. All she really cares about is to have a man in the house and doesn’t give a hoot in hell what she says she is. And it isn’t even hypocritical, it’s deeper than that. It’s having the man.” With things like this—and it was one of many—Mimi tried to pierce you through. Sufficiently said, I suppose, the thing was true for her. She believed in words, in speaking, and if she convinced you, then she herself could believe what her inspiration told her. And when it came to speaking, she had borrowed some from Frazer—that private forensic method that didn’t always seem quite right in personal conversation: he with his long knees spread and elbows resting on them, hands clasped, perfect earnestness of eyes, and, as a further warrant of plain talk, the straight white middle part of his sandy hair. Mimi followed his manner as much as she might, and she had more knottedness in her and passion, and the speed you can get from narrow gauge and high compression.
She was, as Einhorn had rightly said that I was, in opposition; only she named names and wrongs, and was an attacker where I had other ways, temperamentally, and she didn’t persuade me. I didn’t believe she was right because emphatic. “Well,” she said, “if you don’t agree with me, why are you quiet? Why don’t you say what you think instead of turning down what I say by grinning? You try to look more simple than you are, and it isn’t honest. But if you know better, come on and speak up.”
“No,” I said, “I don’t know. But I don’t like low opinions, and when you speak them out it commits you and you become a slave of them. Talk will lead people on until they convince their minds of things they can’t feel true.”
She took this as a harder criticism of her than I had meant it to be, and answered me nastily with a kind of cat’s electric friction and meanness of her face.
“Why, you’re a lousy bonehead! If you don’t even know how to be indignant—why, Christ, even a cow gets indignant! And what do you mean, low! You want to have high opinions of garbage? What do you want to become, a sewage plant? Hell, I say no! If a thing is bad it’s bad, and if you don’t hate it you kiss it on the sly.”
She shot it off in my face that I wasn’t mad enough about abominations or aware enough of them, didn’t know how many graves were underneath my feet, was lacking in disgust, wasn’t hard enough against horrors or wrathful about swindles. The worst of which swindles was in getting terrible payment for what should be a loving exchange of bodies and the foundation of all the true things of life. The women to blame for this were far worse than whores. And I guess that she exploded against me in this conversation because I wasn’t enough of an enemy of such things but smiled at such ruining wives too for their female softnesses. I was too indulgent about them, about the beds that would be first stale and then poisonous because their manageresses’ thoughts were on the conquering power of chenille and dimity and the suffocation of light by curtains, and the bourgeois ambering of adventuring man in parlor upholstery. These things not appearing so threatening to me as they ought to appear, I was, on this topic anyhow, a fool to her, one who also could be stuck, leg-bent, in that white spiders’ secretion and paralyzed inside women’s edifices of safety. She had torn Frazer out of that. He was worth saving.
And here I could see what a value she set on the intelligence of men. If they didn’t breathe the most difficult air of effort and nobility, then she wished for them the commonplace death in the gas cloud of settled existence, office bondage, quiet-store-festering, unrecognized despair of marriage without hope, or the commonness of resentment that grows unknown boils in one’s heart or bulbs of snarling flowers. She had a high, absolute standard, and she preferred people to miss it from suffering, vice, being criminal or perverted, or of loony impulse. I learned about her when I knew her better that she was a thief too; she stole her clothes from department stores, stole a good deal, since she liked to dress well, and had even been arrested but got off on suspended sentence. Her method was to put on layers of dresses in the fitting booths, also underpants and slips; and the way she had gotten out of the rap was to convince the court psychiatrist that she had money and could pay but was afflicted with kleptomania. She was proud of this and urged me to do the same should I be caught—she knew of course that I was lifting books. There was another thing of which she was not so proud. About a year before, late one night as she was passing an alley on Kimbark Avenue, a stickup man had tried to take her pocketbook, and she had kicked him in the groin, snatched the gun when he dropped it, and shot him through the thigh. It made her wretched to remember this, and when she talked about it her hands became nervous and worked inward at her waist—which was small: she drew notice to its smallness by wearing broad belts—and her color got rough enough to be a symptom of scarlatina. She tried to get into Bridewell Hospital to see him, and wasn’t allowed.
“The poor guy,” she said, and this was remorse over her savage speed and rashness as well as pity for this boy, haunting the mouth of an alley with that toy of swift decisions. For the robbery money can shrink mighty small, and you can soon handle the satisfaction out of it, but having someone do precisely what you say is a thing of a different order. And a woman too. She didn’t interpret this as cowardice of the assailant but as special mark of crude love appeal, that a city-tutored rough child struggled for his instinct and was less cared about, providentially speaking, than the animal in the woods who was at least in the keeping of nature. Well, she had to go to court and testify, to explain why she had shot him. She didn’t, however, want to bring charges, and she tried to speak a piece to the judge and was prevented. So the boy was given five years for armed robbery, and now she sent him packages and letters. Not because she feared harm from him when he got out, but out of remorse.
This time she wasn’t up the stump, as she spoke of it. Eventually she was able to give Frazer better news. But she made him wait for it. She wanted him to worry, or to give him practice in learning to worry about her and not about himself. She was not easy toward him. She knew it was unequal, that she loved him more than he could her or anyone. But neither was love his calling, as it was hers. And she was very severe and exalted about this. She too could have lived in desert wilderness for the sake of it, and have eaten locusts.
The thing I began to learn from her was of the
utmost importance; namely, that everyone sees to it his fate is shared. Or tries to see to it. You may say that I should have known this before. I should have, and in a way I did, or else Grandma Lausch or Einhorn or the Renlings would have had more success with me. But it was never so clear in anyone as in Mimi Villars, whose actual body was her recruiting place and who more conspicuously issued her own warrant, license, diploma, asserting what she was, and she had no usual place of legitimate activity, like a store, office, or family, or membership anywhere, but banked all on her clinching will, her hard reason, and her obstinate voice. I think she must have recognized—and how could it fail to give her sharp pain?—the contradiction of harsh persuasion to such a love belief as hers. But the thick rind of world-organized resistance made that inevitable. Well, that too was a fate to be shared and another underlying bitterness.
By the end of summer we were already close friends and under suspicion by Tambow of being more. But there was nothing to that except his envious although not grudging imagination, backed by such slight apparent proof as that she came into my room in her petticoat. This was only because we lived on the same floor. She went into Kayo Obermark’s the same way—we had the attic between the three of us; it just was proximity; even if provocation was never far away it came simply from unremitting practice, like that of the fiddler who has a rubber ball in the pocket of his great alpacuna as he rides the train to a concert and is never far from, for him, the greatest thing, along the accidentals and slides of landscape and steel rail. No, she came to borrow a cigarette or to use the closet where she kept the overflow of her dresses. Or to talk.
