The Collected Stories Of Saul Bellow (26 page)

After a year at Columbia she went to work at Reuters, then she taught in a private school and later wrote American feature articles for British and Australian papers. By the age of forty she had formed a company of her own—a journalistic agency specializing in high fashion for women—and eventually she sold this company to an international publishing group and became one of its executives. In the boardroom she was referred to by some as “a good corporate person,” by others as “the czarina of fashion writing.” By now she was also the attentive mother of three small girls. The first of these was conceived with some difficulty (the professional assistance of gynecologists made it possible). The father of these children was Clara’s fourth husband.

Three of the four had been no more than that—men who fell into the husband class. Only one, the third, had been something like the real thing. That was Spontini the oil tycoon, a close friend of the billionaire leftist and terrorist Giangiacomo F., who blew himself up in the seventies. (Some Italians said, predictably, that the government had set him up to explode.) Mike Spontini was not political, but then he wasn’t born rich, like Giangiacomo, whose role model had been Fidel Castro. Spontini made his own fortune. His looks, his town houses and chтteaus and yachts, would have qualified him for a role in
La Dolce Vita.
_ Scores of women were in pursuit. Clara had won the fight to marry him but lost the fight to keep him. Recognizing at last that he was getting rid of her, she didn’t oppose this difficult, arbitrary man and surrendered all property rights in the settlement—a nonsettlement really. He took away the terrific gifts he had made her, down to the last bracelet. No sooner had the divorce come through than Mike was bombed out by two strokes. He was half paralyzed now and couldn’t form his words. An Italian Sairey Gamp type took care of him in Venice, where Clara occasionally went to see him. Her ex-husband would give her an animal growl, one glare of rage, and then resume his look of imbecility. He would rather be an imbecile on the Grand Canal than a husband on Fifth Avenue.

The other husbands—one married in a full-dress church wedding, the others routine City Hall jobs—were… well, to be plain about it, gesture-husbands. Velde was big and handsome, indolent, defiantly incompetent. He worked on the average no longer than six months at any job. By then everybody in the organization wanted to kill him.

His excuse for being in and out of work was that his true talent was for campaign strategies. Elections brought out the best in him: getting media attention for his candidate, who never, ever, won in the primaries. But then, he disliked being away from home, and an election is a traveling show. “Very sweet” went one of Clara’s summaries to Laura Wong, the Chinese American dress designer who was her confidante. “An affectionate father as long as the kids don’t bother him, what Wilder mostly does is sit reading paperbacks—thrillers, science fiction, and pop biographies. I think he feels that all will be well as long as he keeps sitting there on his cushions. To him inertia is the same as stability. Meantime I run the house single-handed: mortgage, maintenance, housemaids, au pair girls from France or Scandinavia—Austrian the latest. I dream up projects for the children, I do the school bit, do the dentist and the pediatrician, plus playmates, outings, psychological tests, doll dressing, cutting and pasting valentines. What else…? Work with their secret worries, sort out their quarrels, encourage their minds, wipe tears. Love them. Wilder just goes on reading P. D. James, or whoever, till I’m ready to snatch the book and throw it in the street.”

One Sunday afternoon she did exactly that—opened the window first and skimmed his paperback into Park Avenue.

“Was he astonished?” asked Ms. Wong.

“Not absolutely. He sees how provoking he is. What he doesn’t allow is that I have reason to be provoked. He’s
there,
_ isn’t he? What else do I want? In all the turbulence, he’s the point of calm. And for all the wild times and miseries I had in the love game—about which he has full information—he’s the answer. A sexy woman who couldn’t find the place to put her emotionality, and appealing to brilliant men who couldn’t do what she really wanted done.”

“And he
does
_ do?”

“He’s the overweening overlord, and for no other reason than sexual performance. It’s stud power that makes him so confident. He’s not the type to think it out. / have to do that. A sexy woman may delude herself about the gratification of a mental life. But what really settles everything, according to him, is masculine bulk. As close as he comes to spelling it out, his view is that I wasted time on Jaguar nonstarters. Lucky for me I came across a genuine Rolls-Royce. But he’s got the wrong car,” she said, crossing the kitchen with efficient haste to take the kettle off the boil. Her stride was powerful, her awkward, shapely legs going too quickly for the heels to keep pace. “Maybe a Lincoln Continental would be more like it. Anyway, no woman wants her bedroom to be a garage, and least of all for a boring car.”

What was a civilized lady like Laura Wong making of such confidences? The raised Chinese cheek with the Chinese eye let into it, the tiny degree of heaviness of the epicanthic fold all the whiter over the black of the eye, and the light of that eye, so foreign to see and at the same time superfamiliar in its sense… What could be more human than the recognition of this familiar sense? And yet Laura Wong was very much a New York lady in her general understanding of things. She did not confide in Clara as fully as Clara confided in her. But then who did, who
could
_ make a clean breast so totally? What Ms. Wong’s rich eyes suggested, Clara in her awkwardness tried in fact to say. To do.

“Yes, the books,” said Laura. “You can’t miss that.” She had also seen Wilder Velde pedaling his Exercycle while the TV ran at full volume.

“He can’t understand what’s wrong, since what I make looks like enough for us. But I don’t earn
all
_ that much, with three kids in private schools. So family money has to be spent. That involves my old parents—sweet old Bible Hoosiers. I can’t make him see that I can’t afford an unemployed husband, and there isn’t a headhunter in New York who’ll talk to Wilder after one look at his curriculum vitae and his job record. Three months here, five months there. Because it’s upsetting me, and for
my
_ sake, my bosses are trying to place him somewhere. I’m important enough to the corporation for that. If he loves elections so much, maybe he should run for office. He
looks
_ congressional, and what do I care if he screws up in the House of Representatives. I’ve been with congressmen, I even married one, and he’s no dumber than they are. But he won’t admit that anything is wrong; he’s got that kind of confidence in himself—so much that he can even take a friendly interest in the men I’ve been involved with. They’re like failed competitors to the guy who won the silver trophy. He’s proud to claim a connection with the famous ones, and when I went to visit poor Mike in Venice, he flew with me.”

“So he isn’t jealous,” said Laura Wong.

“The opposite. The people I’ve been intimate with, to him are like the folks in a history book. And suppose Richard III or Metternich had gotten into
your
_ wife’s pants when she was a girl? Wilder is a name-dropper, and the names he most enjoys dropping are the ones he came into by becoming my husband. Especially the headliners…”

Laura Wong was of course aware that it was not for her to mention the most significant name of all, the name that haunted all of Clara’s confidences. That was for Clara herself to bring up. Whether it was appropriate, whether she could summon the strength to deal with the most persistent of her preoccupations, whether she would call on Laura to bear with her one more time… these were choices you had to trust her to make tactfully.

“… whom he sometimes tapes when they’re being interviewed on CBS or the MacNeil/Lehrer programs. Teddy Regler always the foremost.”

Yes, there was the name. Mike Spontini mattered greatly, but you had to see him still in the husband category. Ithiel Regler stood much higher with Clara than any of the husbands. “On a scale often,” she liked to say to Laura, “he
was
_ ten.”

“Is ten?” Laura had suggested.

“I’d not only be irrational but psycho to keep Teddy in the active present tense,” Clara had said. This was a clouded denial. Wilder Velde continued to be judged by a standard from which Ithiel Regler could never be removed. It did not make, it never could make, good sense to speak of irrationality and recklessness. Clara never would be safe or prudent, and she wouldn’t have dreamed of expelling Ithiel’s influence—not even if God’s angel had offered her the option. She might have answered: You might as well try to replace my own sense of touch with somebody else’s. And the matter would have had to stop there.

So Velde, by taping Ithiel’s programs for her, proved how unassailable he was in his position as the final husband, the one who couldn’t in the scheme of things be bettered. “And I’m glad the man thinks that,” said Clara. “It’s best for all of us. He wouldn’t believe that I might be unfaithful. You’ve got to admire
that.
_ So here’s a double-mystery couple. Which is the more mysterious one? Wilder actually enjoys watching Ithiel being so expert and smart from Washington. And meantime, Laura, I have no sinful ideas of being unfaithful. I don’t even think about such things, they don’t figure in my conscious mind. Wilder and I have a sex life no marriage counselor in the world could fault. We have three children, and I’m a loving mother, I bring them up conscientiously. But when Ithiel comes to town and I see him at lunch, I start to flow for him. He used to make me come by stroking my cheek. It can happen when he talks to me. Or even when I see him on TV or just hear his voice.
He
_ doesn’t know it—I think not—and anyway Ithiel wouldn’t want to do harm, interfere, dominate or exploit—that’s not the way he is. We have this total, delicious connection, which is also a disaster. But even to a woman raised on the Bible, which in the city of New York in this day and age is a pretty remote influence, you couldn’t call my attachment an evil that rates punishment after death. It’s not the sex offenses that will trip you up, because by now nobody can draw the line between natural and unnatural in sex. Anyway, it couldn’t be a woman’s hysteria that would send her to hell. It would be something else….”

What else?” Laura asked. But Clara was silent, and Laura wondered whether it wasn’t Teddy Regler who should be asked what Clara considered a mortal sin. He had known Clara so well, over so many years, that perhaps he could explain what she meant.

This Austrian au pair girl, Miss Wegman—Clara gave herself the pleasure of sizing her up. She checked off the points: dressed appropriately for an interview, hair freshly washed, no long nails, no conspicuous polish. Clara herself was gotten up as a tailored matron, in a tortoiseshell-motif suit and a white blouse with a ruff under the chin. From her teaching days she commanded a taskmistress’s way of putting questions (“Now, Willie, pick up the
Catiline
_ and give me the tense of
abutere
_ in Cicero’s opening sentence”): it was the disciplinarian’s armor worn by a softy. This Austrian chick made a pleasing impression. The father was a Viennese bank official and the kid was correct, civil and sweet. You had to put it out of your head that Vienna was a hatchery of psychopaths and Hitlerites. Think instead of that dear beauty in the double suicide with the crown prince. This child, who had an Italian mother, was called Gina. She spoke English fluently and probably wasn’t faking when she said she could assume responsibility for three little girls. Not laying secret plans to con everybody, not actually full of dislike for defiant, obstinate, mutely resistant kids like Clara’s eldest, Lucy, a stout little girl needing help. A secretly vicious young woman could do terrible damage to a kid like Lucy, give her wounds that would never heal. The two little skinny girls laughed at their sister. They scooped up their snickers in their hands while Lucy held herself like a Roman soldier. Her face was heated with boredom and grievances.

The foreign young lady made all the right moves, came up with the correct answers—why not? since the questions made them obvious. Clara realized how remote from present-day “facts of life” and current history her “responsible” assumptions were—those were based on her small-town Republican churchgoing upbringing, the nickel-and-dime discipline of her mother, who clicked out your allowance from the bus conductor’s changemaker hanging from her neck. Life in that Indiana town was already as out of date as ancient Egypt. The “decent people” there were the natives from whom television evangelists raised big money to pay for their stretch limos and Miami-style vices. Those were Claras preposterous dear folks, by whom she had felt stifled in childhood and for whom she now felt a boundless love. In Lucy she saw her own people, rawboned, stubborn, silent—she saw herself. Much could be made of such beginnings. But how did you coach a kid like this, what could you do for her in New York City?

“Now—is it all right to call you Gina?—what was your purpose, Gina, in coming to New York?”

“To perfect my English. I’m registered in a music course at Columbia. And to learn about the U. S. A.”

A well-brought-up and vulnerable European girl would have done better to go to Bemidji, Minnesota. Any idea of the explosive dangers girls faced here? They could be blown up from within. When she was young (and not only then), Clara had made reckless experiments—all those chancy relationships; anything might have happened; much did; and all for the honor of running risks. This led her to resurvey Miss Wegman, to estimate what might be done to a face like hers, its hair, her figure, the bust—to the Arabian Nights treasure that nubile girls (innocent up to a point) were sitting on. So many dangerous attractions—and such ignorance! Naturally Clara felt that she herself would do everything (up to a point) to protect a young woman in her household, and everything possible meant using all the resources of an experienced person. At the same time it was a fixed belief with Clara that no /лexperienced woman of mature years could be taken seriously. So could it be a serious Mrs. Wegman back in Vienna, the mother, who had given this Gina permission to spend a year in Gogmagogsville? In the alternative, a rebellious Gina was chancing it on her own. Again, for the honor of running risks.