by Saul Bellow
She heard him, he caught her eye, and she laughed at him and said, “Here’s a guy who’ll live and die trying to look like Cesar Romero.”
“First thing, she comes in, she has to take off her stockings and show her gams …”
This argument had to run its course, and then we couldn’t stay; we finished our conversation in the street.
“No,” I said, “I can’t complain about having been born.”
“Yes, sure, you’d even feel grateful if you knew to whom, and for what was only an accident.”
“It couldn’t have been all an accident. On my mother’s side at least I can be sure there was love in it.”
“Is it love that saves it from being an accident?”
“I mean the desire that there should be more life; from gratitude.”
“Show me where that is! Why don’t you go down to the Fulton egg market and think it over there. Find me the gratitude—”
“I can’t argue with you that way. But if you ask me whether obliviousness would have been better for me, then I’d be a liar if I answered ‘yes’ or even ‘maybe,’ because the facts are against it. I couldn’t even swear that I knew what obliviousness was, but I could tell you a lot about how pleasant my life has been.”
“That’s hunky-dory for you; maybe you like the way you are, but most people suffer from it. They suffer from what they are, such as they are; this woman because she’s getting wrinkled and her husband won’t love her; and that one because she wants her sister to die and leave her Buick; and still another who is willing to devote her whole life to keep her fanny in the right shape; or getting money out of somebody; or thinking about getting a better man than her husband. Do you want me to give you a list on men too? I could go on as long as you like. They’ll never change, one beautiful morning. They can’t change. So maybe you’re lucky. But others are stuck; they have what they have; and if that’s their truth, where are we?”
Me, I couldn’t think all was so poured in concrete and that there weren’t occasions for happiness that weren’t illusions of people still permitted to be forgetful of permanent disappointment, more or less permanent pain, death of children, lovers, friends, ends of causes, old age, loathsome breath, fallen faces, white hair, retreated breasts, dropped teeth; and maybe most intolerable the hardening of detestable character, like bone, similar to a second skeleton and creaking loudest before the end. But she, who had to make up her mind practically, couldn’t be expected to make it up by my feelings. She let you know, but quick, that you, a man, could talk, but she was the one for whom it was the flesh and blood trouble, and she even had a pride about it that made her cheeks shine, that in her was something ultimate.
I didn’t keep up these arguments with her. And although not convinced by her, I wasn’t utterly horrified for the unborn either. To be completely consistent in that kind of economy of souls you would have to have great uneasiness and remorse that wombs should ever be unoccupied; likewise, that hospitals, prisons, and madhouses and graves should ever be full. That wide a spread is too much. The decision was really up to her, whether to have a child by Frazer who wasn’t free to marry her now, even if she wanted to marry him. And, by the way, I didn’t take at face value all that she said about him.
However, I wasn’t any too sure about the injection. I wanted to ask Padilla about it, who was my scientific authority, and I tried to get him at his laboratory. If he didn’t know the answer himself he could ask one of his biological buddies in that semi-skyscraper of a building where there were always dogs barking with abnormal strain, which made me flinch a little when I heard it. Padilla didn’t seem to mind this; he only went there to do calculations in that slip-slop queer swift way, standing on an eccentric point, a hand in his pocket and an untouched cigarette burning with forked smoke. But I couldn’t find him before Mimi’s appointment with the doctor. To which I took her.
This doctor was a man made dolorous, or anyhow heavy of mood, by the bad times, and he looked very unprofessional. There was a careless office of old equipment, and he sat in rolled sleeves and smoked cigars at a desk where my book-accustomed eyes spotted a Spinoza and a Hegel and other things odd for a doctor, and especially one in his line. Under him there was a music shop. My memory gives me back the name: Stracciatella. In the window there was the entire family, playing guitars to a microphone—the young girls and barelegged boys whose feet didn’t yet touch the floor, and the sounds covering the street, cold that night, after a snowfall, with a noise of wires stronger even than the competition of the streetcars, old on that line and passing with a ruckus.
The doctor didn’t misrepresent what he had to offer—he was too careless even for that. He wasn’t hardhearted maybe, but he appeared to ask, “What could I accomplish by caring?” Perhaps there was a disdain about him for the double powerlessness of creatures, first to oppose love and then to be free of the consequences. Naturally he took me for the lover. I suppose Mimi wanted him to; as for me, that wasn’t what I cared about. Therefore, this was how we were, in the office, the stout doctor explaining his injection for our lay understanding, fat-faced, dry, unarduous, heavy of breath, his arms hairy, the office stinking of cigars and of his sedentary career in old black leather. He was not actually unkind, in his goggles, and partly a man of thought—just as far as the difficulties that purify, and no farther. Then the guitars breaking their step, a wiry woe and clatter. And Mimi with fair face and hair, red cheeks, a cloth rose laying down its folds front and center of her hat, assisted by white and less serious flowers. O that red! of summer walls and yet of fabric and the counters of stores. Also her demonish or ciliary eyebrows, so hard-set and yet she was also so confused. But the time was one of the highest opportunity, if I understood her spirit, having to do with that same powerlessness the doctor observed—the powerlessness of women waiting for what will be done to them, and that way and none other to buy glory.
“This injection causes contractions,” said the doctor, “and it may expel your trouble. Nobody can promise that it will, and sometimes even if it works you still need a dilation and curettage. The thing actresses in Hollywood describe in the paper as appendicitis.”
“I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t make any jokes. I’m only interested in your medical services,” Mimi told him right off, and he saw he wasn’t dealing with a timid little knocked-up factory girl who was grateful, he’d think, for his wit and signal back to him dimly with a smile over the vast separating distances of real grief and danger. Some poor body in trouble from tenderness. But Mimi—her tenderness didn’t have an easy visibility. You wondered what it would be, and after what terrific manifestations it would appear.
“Let’s just keep everything professional,” she said.
He said, with offended dark nose holes, “Okay, do you want the injection or not?”
“Well, what the hell do you think I came all this way for, a cold night!”
He got up and put an enamel pot on the gas ring—a grizzly-claw collar of fires giving hot scratches. His handling of the pot was suggestive of the laziness and sloppiness of his morning egg in the kitchen; he dropped the hypo in, fished it up again with tongs, and was ready.
“And suppose I need other help, if this only works halfway, will I get it from you?”
He shrugged.
Her voice began to ring. “Well, you’re one hell of a doctor! Don’t discuss it before you start? Or don’t you give a damn what happens to people after they take your injection? You think they’re so desperate you don’t have to give a damn and they’re only fooling with their lives, is that the way it is?”
“If I had to, I might be able to do something for you.”
I said, “You mean you do if you get paid. How much do you soak for it?”
“A hundred bucks.”
“You wouldn’t settle for fifty?” she said.
“You might find somebody who would.” He meant to show—and I thought it was genuine—that he didn’t care. Non curo! That was what came easiest to him. He woul
d just as soon have put away the hypo and gone back to picking his nose and to his ideas.
I counseled her not to talk money with him. I said to her, “That part of it isn’t important.”
“You want to go ahead with it? Look, to me it’s just the same.”
“Mimi, you can still change your mind,” I said for her own ear.
“And where will I be if I change it? On the same spot still.”
I helped her off with her fur-collared coat, and she took me by the hand as if it were I that had to be led to the needle. At the moment of my putting my arm around her—feeling her need and wanting greatly to do all I could to meet it—she broke into sobs. The thing affected me too; I caught it from her. So we held together like what we were not, a pair of lovers.
However, the doctor would not let us forget he was waiting. Sorrowful or tiresome, was this for him? Something between the two, and he watched how I would comfort her. Whatever there was to envy before, taking me as her lover, this was not enviable to him now. Well, he didn’t know.
But Mimi had decided, and she wasn’t wavering; these tears didn’t mean that. She gave him her arm, and he sank the needle in it; the hard-looking fluid went down. He told her she would have pains like birth pangs and had better go to bed. The bite for this was fifteen bucks, which she was able to pay; she didn’t want any money from me at the moment. Not that I had a lot of it. Going with Lucy kept me broke. Frazer owed me something, but if he had been able to pay he would also have been able to send money to Mimi. She didn’t want him to be bothered about it. He was still raising money for his divorce. Besides, it was part of Frazer’s style not to know about such things. There was always something superior to what was happening in the immediate view, more eminent. This was a part of him that Mimi’s satire was always aimed at, and yet she encouraged it as something precious as well as foolish. It wasn’t that he was specially ungenerous but that he put things off to give his generosity a longer and more significant route.
Anyway, Mimi went to bed, cursing the doctor, for the action had already set in. However, it was “dry,” she said, and the cramps weren’t going to affect anything. She shuddered and sweated, her bare shoulders thin and square above the quilt, and the childish form of her forehead painfully determined with lines, eyes greatly widened, strongly lighted blue.
“Oh, that dirty, bloody gypper!”
“Mimi, but he said nothing might happen. Wait—”
“What in the name of hell can I do now but wait when I’m shot full of this terrible poison? I must be caught strong, for it’s squeezing my guts out. That lousy clumsy cow doctor! Oh!”
Intermittently the spasms passed off and she found the spirit for a relieving joke. “It’s sitting tight, won’t budge; stubborn thing. While some women have to stay on their backs nine months to keep theirs. Listen to the radio. But”—increasing in seriousness—“I can’t let it alone now and be born, with all the stuff I’ve taken. It might be hurt. Groggy. If not, it might be dangerous because it’s so obstinate, and be a criminal. I think if he’d be wild enough and kick the world around I might let him come. Why do I say ‘he’ though? It might be a girl, and what would I do to a daughter, poor child? Still women—women. They do themselves more credit, there’s more reality in women. They live closer to their nature. They have to. It’s more with them. They have the breasts. They see their blood, and it does them good, while men are let to be vainer. Oh! give me your hand, will you, Augie, for Chrissake?” It was the return of the gripes, making her sit stiffly and squeeze and bear down on my hand. With shut eyes she let the spasm pass through and then lay back, and I helped her cover up.
Little by little the effect of the drug ended and left her tired in the muscles and belly, furious with the doctor and angry also with me.
“But you know he didn’t make any promises.”
“Don’t be stupid,” she said, ugly. “How do you know he gave me a big enough dose? Or if he didn’t want me to come back and have it done the other way, so he’d get more? And that’s what it will have to be. Only I’m not going to him.”
Seeing how she was, fiery and sullen, though weakened, and wanting nobody near, I let her be and went to my room.
Kayo Obermark had the room between us, and of course he was on to what was happening; in spite of Mimi’s efforts to keep him out, how could he miss? He was young, about my own age of twenty-two, but ponderous already, a big, important, impatient face, irritable, smoky with thought that went out far. He was gloomy and rough. His life was rugged in there, that room; he didn’t like classes, his notion being that he could do all his own learning; the room was foul from the moldering of old things and smelled of bottles he used for urine, because he didn’t like to make trips to the toilet when he was working. He lived half-naked in his bed, which all the rest of the room approached, heaped up with commodities and dirt. He was melancholy and brilliant. He thought the greatest purity was outside human relations, that those only begot lies and cabbage-familiarity, and he told me, “I prefer stones any time. I could be a geologist. I’m not even disappointed in humankind, I just don’t care about it, and if there’s one thing that’s sure, it’s that this world is certainly not enough, and if there isn’t any more they can have it all back.”
Kayo wanted to know about Mimi although she always baited him.
“What’s the matter, she having it rough? She has hard luck.”
“Yes, it’s bad.”
“But nah! it’s not all luck,” he said—one of the things he couldn’t stand was that you should agree with him. “You notice people have the same kind of thing happen to them, over and over and over.”
His attitude to her had something in common with the doctor’s; it was woman’s trouble she had, and neither of them could place it very high. Kayo, however, was a much more intelligent man than the doctor, and though as he stood in my room on bare weight-flattened feet in undershirt, the hair in tufts on his shoulders, and that large face from which everyone was reproached for letting him down and coming short of the mark—though, in other words, he was the hard figure of prejudice, there was still in him an extra effort of justice, a channel kept open.
“Well—you understand. Everyone has bitterness in his chosen thing. Bitterness in his chosen thing. That’s what Christ was for, that even God had to have bitterness in his chosen thing if he was really going to be man’s God, a god who was human. She also goes in for it.” He gave a heave of terrible impatience. “That was Christ. Other gods poured on the success, knocked you down with their splendor. Those that didn’t give a damn. Real success, you see, is terrifying. Can’t face that. Rather ruin everything first. Everything would have to be changed. You can’t find a pure desire except the one that everything should be mixed. We run away from what can be conceived pure, and everyone acts out this disappointment in his own way as if to prove that the mixed and impure will and must win.”
I was always impressed by him and his big horse’s eyes startled by wisdom or the shadow of it, as a horse may shy at a ridiculous thing the same as at an important one. I felt what he was saying. I knew there was truth in it, and had respect for him as the source of illumination; even while himself he was in dark colors, some of smudge, and green and blue by the eyes, but some of radiance; and, hands on his fat hips, he looked at me with a face in which some original beauty was turned down as a false lead. That this fact that all had to give in was acted out I could see, and the accompanying warning that to hope too much was a killing disease. Yes, pestilential hope that passes under the evils and leaves them standing. I had enough of a dose of it to recognize it. So I was both drawn to Kayo’s view and resistant to it. No painted sky of the human theater for him, but always on the outside toward the diamond-drop true sky by means of the long, star-crawling clear fog of the medulla and brain, a copy of the Milky Way.
But I had the idea also that you don’t take so wide a stand that it makes a human life impossible, nor try to bring together irreconcilables that des
troy you, but try out what of human you can live with first. And if the highest should come in that empty overheated tavern with its flies and the hot radio buzzing between the plays and plugged beer from Sox Park, what are you supposed to do but take the mixture and say imperfection is always the condition as found; all great beauty too, my scratched eyeballs will always see scratched. And there may gods turn up anywhere.
“If you go into reasons,” I said to Kayo, “there may be reasons for these mixed things too.”
“Not real,” he answered. “You wouldn’t try to live on a movie screen. When you understand that, you’ll be on your way to something. You can be too, if I’m not wrong about your character. You wouldn’t be afraid to believe in something. What I don’t get is why you want to make a dude of yourself. It won’t keep up though.”
Mimi heard that we were talking and she called me. I went back to her.
“What does he want?” she said.
“Kayo?”
“Yes, Kayo.”
“We were just talking.”
“You were talking about me. If you tell him anything I’ll murder you. All he ever looks for is proof he’s right, and he’d walk on my chest with his big feet if he could.”
