by Saul Bellow
“But I was saying”—he gave me a genial smile with heart-felt squint and then he yawned and enjoyed the golden light—“how a guy struggles with malice. How life goes beyond the conscience of nice well-reared people. A good upbringing stops them from knowing what they think even. Because we all think the same, more or less. You love Stella—all right, don’t you?”
“Like I never loved anyone before.”
“That’s swell. That’s what I call answering like a man. When is your birthday?”
“In January.”
“I’d have sworn to it. So is mine. I believe the highest types are born in January. It’s barometric—you can look it up in Ellsworth Huntington. The parents make love in spring when the organism is healthiest and then the best specimens are conceived. If you want children you should plan to knock up your dear one in that season. Ancient wisdom is right. Now science comes lately and finds it out. But what I wanted to say about your bride, even she, is that she’s no different from the rest of us except more gifted and beautiful. It is absolutely certain that she has thought of the future both with and without you.
I should worry, I should care,
I should marry a millionaire,
He should die and I should cry,
I should marry another guy.
But this has taken place in inner consciousness, which is outlaw and accepts no check. What of it? Life is possible anyhow. Except that even legitimate and reasonable things have to come through this Mongolia, or clear-light desert minus trees. What do we respect more than commerce and industry? But when Mr. Cecil Rhodes of the British Empire weeps many tears because he can’t do business with the blazing stars, this is not decadence but inner consciousness speaking over all the highest works of presumptuous man.”
I was deeply wounded when he spoke of Stella in this way. Where did he get off, this rude bastard, having her bump me off in her inner consciousness? I burned with resentment. “First you talk about ancient wisdom,” I said, angry, “and then you take a crack at love.”
“Well, I’m a sonofabitch!” he said, getting up in the Turkish heat and rewrapping the towel. “I didn’t mean to hurt any feelings. Damn! If I did in this idle conversation to while away time, please forgive me. I see you really are, really, in love. God bless you for such noble feelings! You’re going to ship out soon too, and the danger as well as separation from the loved one has stirred up natural emotions. But this little song of little girls also is ancient wisdom. This is not a reason for cynicism, but pride in the conquest of nature. The human mind has bounded the exploding oceans of universal space; the head has swallowed up the empyrean. But you shouldn’t overlook also how much secret thought and conniving goes on.
“Listen, since we’re talking, let me give you a few examples from my practice of what goes on in other parts of the soul. A few years ago a client’s wife reports she has lost a valuable bracelet. Perfectly trustworthy woman, and mother of three, a wealthy husband who has given her a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of property, only keeping the power of attorney for himself. The bracelet is lost? Very well. It’s just a routine matter for the company. They investigate, come back to the husband, and tell him, Your wife did not lose this bracelet, she gave it to her lover who was broke.’ Yoy, indignation! ‘My wife, a lover? My respected spouse, mother of children, who shows me constant affection and proofs of loyalty? My dear wife, my beloved of years?’ Nevertheless her can has been over a barrel, she has spread, or equivalent. This poor man. Heart-shattered! How could it be! Imagine his pain and bewilderment that she should have such a secret from him. What a failure of life when he worked so hard that there should be a certain, guaranteed reason that life might last longer than from Thursday to Saturday. If anything deserves tears this does. However, he mustn’t take the word of the insurance investigator, so he comes to me and I get him a private eye. He comes back with the same facts, that this lover is a bum with a prison record for pimping and dealing in hot goods. They show the poor husband a photo, even, so he can describe this character. Thick nose, long sideburns. You know the type. Well, the poor fellow is going crazy. And now he finds that in the whole suburb where he lives he’s the only one who didn’t know about it. They’re seen in the car, parked all over the vicinity. The woods, the bushes. It comes down on him like a busted house. ‘Who is left among you that saw this house in her first glory? and how do ye see it now?’”
Oh, the poor guy. My heart broke for him.
“People start to tell him, ‘Throw her out, man! Don’t be a damn chump. This other guy has been ramming her and been her fancy-man at your expense.’ So not able to stand it any more, he accuses her. Why, she denies everything. Every single thing, He brings out names, dates, places, therefore, and there’s nothing she can say. All is true. Then she says, ‘I won’t leave this house and the children, they’re mine.’ He comes to me and asks advice. All the law is on his side. He can throw her in the street if he wants. But does he want? No!”
Like the wife of Hosea who fooled around, I thought: “Thou shalt abide for me many days.”
“And I’ll tell you something else. She loved her husband too. That’s how clouded the situation can be. She gave up the fancy pimp. And then the neighbors saw her and the husband in the movies holding hands and kissing like young lovers.”
I was glad it had turned out like that, and they forgave each other. My heart gave a happy bound that they had made it.
I said, “You have to pity the wife also.”
“You have to pity her more,” said Mintouchian, “because she had to do the lying and lead the two lives. This secrecy is what the real burden is. You come home still panting or dripping or dizzy from an encounter. And what’s here? Another world, another life; you are another self. You also know exactly what you are doing. Exactly as a druggist when he goes from one prescription to another. Just the right amount of atropine or arsenic. There’d better be. There’d better!” Mintouchian said with kind of personal barbarism or force of heart. He couldn’t stop it up. “You come home. ‘Hello, husband or wife.’ ‘What was in the office today?’ ‘Just the usual.’ ‘I see you changed the sheets.’ ‘I also sent out the insurance premium.’ ‘That’s good.’ So you are another person. Where are the words you spoke an hour before? Gone! Where is Central? Oh my dear friend, Central is listening in from Mongolia. Do you say a double life? It’s secret over secret, mystery and then infinity sign stuck on to that. So who knows the ultimate, and where is the hour of truth?
“Of course,” he said, “this has got nothing to do with you.” He grinned and tried to get brighter, but there was some sort of darkness at this time in the superilluminated little sweat room. He went on after this effort, as follows: “But just for the interest of it I give you another case. There was a rich couple I had before the war. Husband handsome, wife gorgeous. Connecticut, Yale, and so forth background. The husband goes to Italy on a business trip, meets an Italian lady and has an affaire de coeur, and then he indiscreetly corresponds with the lady after he comes back. The wife catches a letter of love he kept in his back pocket. Not only did he keep it, March, but where the words of the dear hand were faded by his perspiration he restored them with his own pen. Then the wife comes to me with blood in her eye. Now I know for a fact that while he was gone she had herself a ball with someone, a man friend. But now she wants the husband punished. Because she caught him! She wants to go to Italy with the husband, confront the Italian lady, and have the husband deny before them both he ever loved her. Otherwise, divorce. Naturally I can’t tell the husband what to do, and he goes. Seven-thousand-mile trip to perform this necessary act. They then come home, and what do you think? You’re an intelligent man, you know what then.”
“He finds out about her. Listen,” I said, now smelling a rat, “how are these stories supposed to apply, just now, before my marriage? Are you saying that I should put the shoe on to see if it fits?” The thought made me boil.
“Hup! Now don’t take it personally.
I never said these stories applied to you. They probably apply only in general. Would I say anything against Miss Chesney? Not only is she Agnes’s friend, but I wouldn’t be a killjoy and interfere with genuine love, which I see all over you.
“You may be as interested as I was, though, in what a clever fellow once said to me about the connection of love and adultery. On any certain day, when you’re happy, you know it can’t last, but the weather will change, the health will be sickness, the year will end, and also life will end. In another place another day there’ll be a different lover. The face you’re kissing will change to some other face, and so will your face be replaced. It can’t be helped, this guy said. Of course he was a lousy bastard himself and a counterfeit no-good mooch, and he was in and out of Bellevue, and women supported him all his life; he deserted his kid and nobody could depend on him. But love is adultery, he said, and expresses change. You make your peace with change. Another city, another woman, a different bed, but you’re the same and so you must be flexible. You kiss the woman and you show how you love your fate, and you worship and adore the changes of life. You obey this law. Whether or not this bum was right, may God hate his soul! don’t think you don’t have to obey the laws of life.”
My strange teacher, for he certainly was teaching, said further, “Erratic is nothing. Only system taps the will of the universe.”
“I want to obey those laws,” I said. “I’m not trying to get out from under. I never did try.”
By now the sweat was running very fast down both our faces, and his carnival towel, which had fallen from his fat chest and armpits down to the everglades moss of his belly, was like the robe of a sage. I would never agree that love had to be adultery. Never! Why, imagine! Even if I had to admit that many lovers were adulterers, such as Paolo and Francesca or Anna Karenina, Grandma Lausch’s favorite. Which led my mind toward suffering that got mixed with love. As eating the damaged fruit so as not to offend the gods, for whom pure joy is reserved.
He looked as if he were grinning, with great, bland, pouring-faced kindness, like a sage, prophet, or guru, a prince of experience with his jewel toes. I wanted him to give me wisdom.
“Why do you have to think that the thing that kills you is the thing that you stand for? Because you are the author of your death. What is the weapon? The nails and hammer of your character. What is the cross? Your own bones on which you gradually weaken. And the husband or the wife gets the other to do the deed. ‘Kind spouse, you will make me my fate,’ they might as well say, and tell them and show them how. The fish wills water, and the bird wills air, and you and me our dominant idea.”
“Can you say what is your dominant idea, Mr. Mintouchian?”
He answered readily, “Secrets. Society makes us have some, of course. The brotherhood of man wants to let us out of them by the power of confession. But I must beget secrets. I will be known by secrets at my death, like St. Blas who was killed by wool combs and was made the patron saint of woolcombers.
“Complications, lies, lies, and lies!” he said. “Disguises, vaudevilles, multiple personalities, diseases, conversations. Even in a few minutes’ conversation, do you realize how many times what you feel is converted before it comes out as what you say? Somebody tells you A. Your response is B. B you can’t say, so you transform it, you put it through the coils of your breast. From DC to AC, increased four hundred volts, filtered. So instead of B there comes out gamma sub one. The longer the train of transformation, the worse the stink of gamma sub one. Mind you, I’m a great admirer of our species. I stand in awe of the genius of the race. But a large part of this genius is devoted to lying and seeming what you are not. We love when this man Ulysses comes back in disguise for his revenge. But suppose he forgot what he came back for and just sat around day in, day out in the disguise. This happens to many a frail spirit who forgets what the disguises are for, doesn’t understand complexity, or how to return to simplicity. From telling different things to everyone, forgets what the case is originally and what he wants himself. How rare is simple thought and pureheartedness! Even a moment of pureheartedness I bow to, down to the ground. That’s why I think well of you when you tell me you’re in love. I appreciate this durability, and I’m a lover myself.”
God bless Mintouchian! What a good man! He really paid attention, and I returned him love for love.
“You will understand, Mr. Mintouchian, if I tell you that I have always tried to become what I am. But it’s a frightening thing. Because what if what I am by nature isn’t good enough?” I was close to tears as I said it to him. “I suppose I better, anyway, give in and be it. I will never force the hand of fate to create a better Augie March, nor change the time to an age of gold.”
“That’s exactly right. You must take your chance on what you are. And you can’t sit still. I know this double poser, that if you make a move you may lose but if you sit still you will decay. But what will you lose? You will not invent better than God or nature or turn yourself into the man who lacks no gift or development before you make the move. This is not given to us.”
“That’s right, and I’m grateful to you,” I said. “I owe you much for this explanation.”
This took place on the fifty-eighth story of a building in midtown Manhattan, behind sliding glass doors. No use being so blasé as not to mention it.
“It is better to die what you are than to live a stranger forever,” he said.
After this he concentrated in silence for a while, as though he were counting drops from an invisible dropper. What were the drops of, of pure essence, or of gall?
“I think you will be interested in a matter that’s bothered me the last few months.” Gall. I saw that now. His large eyes grew heavy and sad.
“The reason why I told of a bracelet before,” he said, “is that I have jewelry on my mind on account of a diamond ring that Mrs. Kuttner, Agnes, lost several months ago. She said she was mugged in Central Park while walking the dog in the evening. It happens of course that people are mugged.”
“But why wear a diamond ring while walking a dog?”
“That is explained by the fact that we had a date. On her throat fingermarks. Good enough evidence, huh? Also, she was found lying on a path between the Met and the children’s playground. The cops took her home. Pretty convincing, isn’t it?”
“It sounds absolutely—”
“She collected the insurance of five thousand dollars. And now I tell you in strict confidence that she did it all herself.”
“What?”
“Choked herself unconscious. The marks on her throat she made with her own fingers.”
“How could she!”
“She could.”
The vision of the Vienna beauty choking herself in the night park stupefied me. “How do you know?”
“Because one of her friends is keeping the ring for her.”
“But what is she trying to put over?”
“That’s the whole thing. I give her all the money she needs. Plus sending a check to her husband in Cuba. So what does she want this extra swindle for?”
“Maybe it’s just social-security money, like? Have you provided for her?”
“She is very managing about property. That’s my best hope. Provided? Of course. I gave her a house on the Island. But what if it isn’t that? You get the pitch? She has secrets from me; she’s doublelifing me.”
“It might turn out to be something very ordinary, like a brother in trouble she doesn’t want to tell you about. Or she’s tired of just being handed money and wants to make money.”
He was aware that I was trying to comfort him.
“There must be easier ways. No, what if it’s to pay off somebody? Ah, law practice makes me very suspicious. But don’t you see where I’m at?” Mintouchian asked me. “With my outlook?”
Sometimes on short acquaintance you can get very closely knitted to someone. And Mintouchian and I now were.
On this particular Saturday, Stella and Agnes not showing up bec
ause of a misunderstanding about the arrangements, Mintouchian became very nervous as we waited in his office for them. Dinner hour with his wife was approaching, that was why. Finally he sent word by his chauffeur to Stella’s apartment that we’d join them at half-past nine, and then took me home with him in a cab, across the park.
So I met Mrs. Mintouchian. I couldn’t figure out her complaint. She was dressed in a quilted blue robe and her hair was gray. She was dignified, if not haughty; I felt her conduct like a kind of touching athletic prowess.
