by Saul Bellow
Of course I didn’t grasp this right away. It came out during the next few days, during which we stayed in the apartment. We slept and woke, and we didn’t really discuss my doings or hers. Suitcases were standing around the bed, but I didn’t ask about them. It was just as well that I didn’t go out, for the hoodlums were looking to make an object lesson of me. Grammick told me when I got around to phoning him.
Other women I had known—well, I didn’t blame them that I loved them less than Thea. Only it was through her that I began to learn somewhat about the reasons behind my opinions. There were some people who were too slow in their life, because of fatigue, unwillingness, hardship, sorrow, mistrust; and some were too fast out of other trouble or desperation. But as far as I was concerned, Thea had perfect life. So that any no-account thing, such as her walking to the kitchen or bending to pick up an object from the floor, when I would see the shape of her back, her spine, or the soft departure of her breasts, or her brush, made my soul topple over. I loved her to the degree that anything she chanced to do was welcome to me. I was very happy. And when she was going about the room and I lay stretched and occupied so much of her bed with my body, I was about like a king, as to the pleasure of my face, looking on, watching her.
Her face was paler than I had remembered, but then I hadn’t observed it so well before. Some pains of life were in it too, sure enough, when you looked close, though just at present her eyes were relatively clear of them. She had black hair. The roots came a little unevenly from her forehead, upward, beautiful at that. You had to look well to notice this eccentricity. Her eyes were most dark. She often applied rouge to her mouth from a little tube on the bed table as though feeling she had to stay adorned at least that way, with the carnation color, and a fire smudge came off on the pillows and on me.
Now, when I had called in from South Chicago, Thea had told me she didn’t have much time, she would have to leave soon. And the first few days, as I’ve said, she didn’t speak of it, but eventually the open suitcases brought up the subject and she told me that she had been, and legally still was, married, and she was on her way from Long Island to Mexico to get a divorce. Afraid to hurt my feelings, all she’d say at the outset was that her husband was considerably older than either of us and was very rich. But gradually more came out. He flew a Stinson plane, he had tons of ice dumped in his private lake when it became lukewarm in July, he went on Canadian hunting trips, he wore cufflinks worth fifteen hundred dollars, he sent to Oregon for apples and they cost him forty cents apiece, he cried because he was growing bald so quickly, etcetera. Whatever she said was chosen to prove she didn’t love him. But I wasn’t very jealous. I guess because he had lost out there was no cause. Esther also was married and to a man rich as all get-out, a lawyer in Washington, D.C. This rung very foreign to me, as she didn’t quite observe—the planes, the hunting, and the colossal cliffs of dough. Thea too traveled with sports equipment—breeches, boots, gun cases, cameras; in the can I had by chance turned on an infra-red bulb that she used for developing films, and in the bathtub were pans with fluid and unfamiliar pipes and gizmos.
Well, during this talk it was evening beside the window. We were at the table, having just eaten supper, which was ordered by phone. There was a watermelon rind, chicken bones, and so on. She was telling me about her husband, but all I could think of was my luck, at this point and hour as she was leaning her head on the curtain, and on her own hands behind her just by the open window and its shadow of blue which cleared the trees and then got paler. The trees grew in the little yard, which was covered with white gravel. Some big insect flew in and began walking on the table. I don’t know what insect it was, but it was brown, shining, and rich in structures. In the city the big universal chain of insects gets thin, but where there’s a leaf or two it’ll be represented. And then beneath us the dinner dishwater was splashing in an apartment; and over toward Hell’s Kitchen, from a couple of belfries like the twin points of the black leathery sand-shark egg-cases you find on beaches, the sound of bells went out. This Roman-twilight firing or mild shelling the targets scarcely even heard for the sloshing of the tapwater and the conk of china. I was wearing one of her bathrobes and my legs were stretched under the table from a silk armchair, and on an occasion like this, as glad as I was, what was I going to do, be envious of her husband whom she had left?
Since I had come near being Lucy Magnus’s husband, I understood why Thea had married at the same time as her sister and to the same sort of man. Though she could be ironical about them now, I found out later that she had a weakness for being successful in social circles like this man Smith’s, or at least she liked to feel she outclassed the women from those Boston or Virginia families. Which was a department of rivalry I didn’t know much about.
She assumed that I’d go to Mexico with her, and I never seriously thought of refusing. I knew I didn’t have what it took, of pride, or of a strong feeling of duty, to ask her to come back another time when I was ready, or at least in better position, honorably quits with the union, or when I could at least pay my own way. I said I had no money, and she answered seriously, “Take what you need from the refrigerator.” She was in the habit of leaving the dough she got in change from the delivery men and also checks and so forth in the refrigerator. The money was mixed up with rotting salad leaves and lying with saucers of bacon grease, which she didn’t like to throw away. Anyway, the fives and tenners were there, and I was to pick up what I needed on the way out, as a man takes a handkerchief from his drawer on slight thought.
I had a conversation with Grammick to ask him to step into my place at the Northumberland. He already had done what he could. There was no wildcat strike. He said the union guy and his boys were really gunning for me, to lay low. When I told him I was quitting and leaving town he was surprised. However, I explained about Thea, that I absolutely had to go with her, and he appeared to take it better. He said it was a lousy deal anyway to be stuck in these dual-union situations, and the organization ought to put on a real drive in the hotel field or quit.
Thea outfitted me before the trip. In which connection, for some reason, I get the picture something like the Duke of Wellington stepping out in the dress of the Salisbury Hunt, blue coat, black cap, and buckskins. Maybe this is because Thea had such very exact ideas as to what I should put on. We went from shop to shop in the station wagon to try on clothes. When she thought a thing was right she kissed me and cried, “Oh, baby, you make me happy!” unmindful of all the stiffness in the salespeople and the other customers. When I picked something she didn’t like she’d give a laughing start and say, “Oh, you fool! Take it off. That’s like what the old lady in Evanston thought was so smart.” The clothes Simon had given me she disliked too. She wanted me to look like a sportsman, and she got me a heavy leather jacket at Von Lengerke and Antoine’s that required you to want to kill game or you couldn’t wear it. It was a knockout, with a dozen different kinds of pockets and slits for cartridges and handline, knife, waterproof matches, compass. You could be thrown in the middle of Lake Huron in it and hope to live. Then for boots we crossed Wabash Avenue to Carson’s, where I hadn’t gone since Jimmy Klein trapped me that bad moment in the revolving doors.
In these joints it was she who did the talking. Mostly silent, feeling full of blood, I came up smiling to try on the things and walk inside the triple mirror to let her turn me by the shoulder and see. I was glad over her least peculiarity—that she spoke high, that she didn’t care that her slip showed a loop from her brilliant green dress, or that there were hairs on her neck that had escaped the gathering of the comb, hairs of Japanese blackness. Her dresses were expensive, but, as I had noticed her hat trembling when she had come up to my room, there never lacked one piece of disorder caused by excitement, and where arrangement failed.
Going through this, being kissed in the stores and the purchases and gifts, my luck didn’t make me hangdog, I’ll say that for myself. If she had handed me titles and franchises like Eli
zabeth to Leicester it wouldn’t have caused me awkwardness; nor would wearing feathers, instead of the deep Stetson that pleased her. So the checks, plaids, chamois, suedes, or high boots that made me come out on Wabash Avenue like a tall visitor or tourist were no embarrassment but made me laugh and even be somewhat vain, putting on like a stranger in my own home town.
She was cuckoo about dime stores, where she bought cosmetics and pins and combs. After we locked the expensive purchases in the station wagon we went into McCrory’s or Kresge’s and were there by the hour, up and down the aisles with the multitude, mostly of women, and in the loud-played love music. Some things Thea liked to buy cheaply; they maybe gave her the best sense of the innermost relations of pennies and nickels and expressed the real depth of money. I don’t know. But I didn’t think myself too good to be wandering in the dime store with her. I went where and as she said and did whatever she wanted because I was threaded to her as if through the skin. So that any trifling object she took pleasure in could become important to me at once; anything at all, a comb or hairpin or piece of line, a compass inside a tin ring that she bought with great satisfaction, or a green-billed baseball cap for the road, or the kitten she kept in the apartment—she would never be anywhere without an animal. This little striped and spike-tailed torn, like a cat of the sea in the wide darkness of the floors of those rooms of the suite that Thea never used. She rented a big place and then settled in a space-economizing style, gathering and piling things around her. There were plenty of closets and dressers but she was still living out of the suitcases, boxes, cases, and you had to approach the bed at the center of this confusion through spaces between. She used sheets as towels and towels as shoe rags or mats or to wipe the kitten’s messes, for it wasn’t housebroken. She gave the maids bribes of perfume and stockings to clean up, wash the dishes, underclothes, and do other extras; or maybe she did it so that they wouldn’t criticize her disorderliness. She thought she was first-rate with clerks and servants. I, the ex-organizer, didn’t say anything.
It didn’t matter. I let a lot of things go past. Those days, whatever touched me had me entirely, and whatever didn’t was like dead, my heart not giving it a tumble. I was never before so taken up with a single human being. I followed her sense wherever it went. As I wasn’t yet old enough to be tired of confinement to my own sense, I didn’t appreciate this enough.
What I did at times realize was how I was abandoning some mighty old protections which now stood empty. Hadn’t I been warned enough because of my mother, and on my own account? With terrible warnings? Look out! Oh, you chump and weak fool, you are one of a humanity that can’t be numbered and not more than the dust of metals scattered in a magnetic field and clinging to the lines of force, determined by laws, eating, sleeping, employed, conveyed, obedient, and subject. So why hunt for still more ways to lose liberty? Why go toward, and not instead run from, the huge drag that threatens to wear out your ribs, rub away your face, splinter your teeth? No, stay away! Be the wiser person who crawls, rides, runs, walks to his solitary ends used to solitary effort, who procures for himself and heeds the fears that are the kings of this world. Ah, they don’t give you much of a break, these kings! Many a dead or dying face lies or drifts under them.
Here Thea appeared with her money, her decided mind set on love and great circumstances, her car, her guns and Leicas and boots, her talk about Mexico, her ideas. One of the chiefest of these ideas being that there must be something better than what people call reality. Oh, well and good. Very good and bravo! Let’s have this better, nobler reality. Still, when such an assertion as this is backed by one person and maintained for a long time, obstinacy finally gets the upper hand. The beauty of it is harmed by what it suffers on the way to proof. I know that.
However, Thea had one superiority in her ideas. She was one of those people who are so certain of their convictions that they can fight for them in the body. If the threat to them goes against their very flesh and blood, as with people who are examined naked by police or with martyrs, you soon know which beliefs have strength and which do not. So that you don’t speak air. For what you don’t suffer in your person is mostly dreaminess, or like shots of light, sky-sprinkling fireworks and creamy wheels that scatter to a sad earth. Thea was prepared for the extremest test of her thoughts.
Not that she herself was always on her own highest standard. I had to accept her version of everything, this being the obstinacy of assertion I spoke of. Also it was evident that she was used to having what she wanted, including me. Her behavior was sometimes curious and crude. When certain long-distance calls came through she’d just about order me out of the room, and then I could hear her yelling and be startled, astonished that she could have a voice like that. I couldn’t catch the words and could only speculate as to the reasons. Then how I’d criticize her if I weren’t her lover would come to me.
She assumed she understood everything about me, and it was astonishing how much she did know; the remainder she made up with confidence and trusted to closed eyes and fast strokes. She therefore said some harsh and jealous things and her look occasionally was more brilliant than friendly. She was aware of her weakness in having come after me—in her confident moments she thought of it instead as strength and was proud of it.
“Did you like that Greek girl?”
“Yes, sure I did.”
“Was it just the same with her as with me?”
“No.”
“I can tell you’re just lying, Augie. Of course it was the same for you.”
“Don’t you find it different with me? Am I like your husband?”
“Like him? Never!”
“Well, can it be so different for you and not also for me? You think I can put it on and not love you?”
“Oh, but I came to look for you, not you for me. I had no pride”—she was forgetting that I scarcely knew her in St. Joe. “You were getting tired of this little Greek chambermaid, and I happened to show up, and it flattered you so much you couldn’t resist. You like to get bouquets like that.” And now, to say this, made her breathe with labor; she was suffering. “You want people to pour love on you, and you soak it up and swallow it. You can’t get enough. And when another woman runs after you, you’ll go with her. You’re so happy when somebody begs you to oblige. You can’t stand up under flattery!”
Maybe so. But what I couldn’t stand up under at the moment was this glare, when she went so hot and white in the face with its strong nerve and metaphysical reckless assertion. Although she painted her mouth with carnation lipstick she didn’t make it sensual, nor did she have a sensual face, but any excitement, no matter what it was, took up her person, her entire being. It was the same whether she was angry or when she was loving and had her breasts against me, clasping hands, touching feet. So even if this jealousy made no sense, still it wasn’t play-acting jealousy.
“If I’d been wise enough I’d have come for you,” I said. “I just didn’t have enough sense, so I’m grateful that you did. And you don’t have to be afraid.”
No, no, what did I want with the upper hand or pride contests? None of that stuff. When she heard me speak like this there was a tremor in her features of the strain passing off; she shrugged and smiled at herself and a more normal color began to appear.
Not only was she accustomed to independence struggles and to resistance, to going counter to the open direction of everyone else, which made her judgments severe, but she was in many ways suspicious. Her experience was, socially, much wider than mine, and so she suspected many things which at the time were out of my range. She must have remembered that when we met I seemed an old woman’s hanger-on who sponged on her and maybe worse than that. Of course she knew better. What she knew of me by now, really knew, was plenty, from information I gave freely. Because involuntarily. But so was her habitual shrewdness involuntary, the shrewd suspiciousness of a rich girl. And then, once you’ve irrevocably made up your mind, does that mean you don’t sweat and fear you can be wrong
? Even Thea with her convictions and confidence wasn’t immune to occasional fits of doubt.
“What makes you say these things about me, Thea?” They bothered me. Certainly there was some truth in them; I felt it in my lining, somewhere, like an object that had slipped down out of the pocket.
“Aren’t they right? Especially about your being so obliging?”
“Well, partly. I used to be much more so. But not so much now.” I tried to tell her that I had looked all my life for the right thing to do, for a fate good enough, that I had opposed people in what they wanted to make of me, but now that I was in love with her I understood much better what I myself wanted.
But what she had to answer was this: “What makes me say these things is that I see how much you care about the way people look at you. It matters too much to you. And there are people who take advantage of that. They haven’t got anything of their own and they’ll leave you nothing for yourself. They want to put themselves in your thoughts and in your mind, and that you should care for them. It’s a sickness. But they don’t want you to care for them as they really are. No. That’s the whole stunt. You have to be conscious of them, but not as they are, only as they love to be seen. They live through observation by the ones around them, and they want you to live like that too. Augie, darling, don’t do it. They will make you suffer from what they are. And you don’t really matter to them. You only matter when someone loves you. You matter to me. Otherwise you don’t matter, you’re only dealt with. So you shouldn’t care how you seem to them. But you do, you care too much.”
