The Collected Stories Of Saul Bellow (52 page)

So Zet laid aside his logic books. They had lost their usefulness. They joined the funny papers he had put away when he was eight years old. He had no more use for Rudolf Carnap than for Boob McNutt. He said to Lottie, “What other books are there?” She went to the shelf and read off the titles. He stopped her at
Moby Dick,
_ and she handed him the large volume. After reading a few pages he knew that he would never be a Ph. D. in philosophy. The sea came into his inland, Lake Michigan soul, he told me. Oceanic cold was just the thing for his fever. He felt polluted, but he read about purity. He had reached a bad stage of limited selfhood, disaffection, unwillingness to be; he was sick; he wanted
out.
_ Then he read this dazzling book. It rushed over him. He thought he would drown. But he didn’t drown; he floated.

The creature of flesh and blood, and ill, went to the toilet. Because of his intestines he shuffled to sit on the board and over the porcelain, over the sewer-connected hole and its water—the necessary disgrace. And when the dizzy floor tiles wavered under his sick eyes like chicken wire, the amethyst of the ocean was also there in the bevels of the medicine-chest mirror, and the white power of the whale, to which the bathtub gave a fleeting gauge. The cloaca was there, the nausea, and also the coziness of bowel smells going back to childhood, the old brown colors. And the dismay and sweetness of ragged coughing and the tropical swampiness of the fever. But also there rose up the seas. Straight through the air shaft, west, and turn left at the Hudson. The Atlantic was there.

The real business of his life was with comprehensive vision, he decided. He had been working in philosophy with the resemblance theory of universals. He had an original approach to the predicate “resemble.” But that was finished. When sick, he was decisive. He had the weak sweats and was coughing up blue phlegm with his fist to his mouth and his eyes swelling. He cleared his throat and said to Lottie, who sat on the bed holding his tea for him during this coughing fit, “I don’t think I can go on in the philosophy department.”

“It’s really worrying you, isn’t it? You were talking philosophy in your sleep the other night.”

“Was I?”

“Talking in your sleep about epistemology or something. I don’t understand that stuff, you know that.”

“Ah, well, it’s not really for me, either.”

“But, honey, you don’t have to do anything you don’t like. Switch to something else. I’ll back you all the way.”

“Ah, you’re a dear woman. But we’ll have to get along without the fellowship.” What’s it worth? Those cheap bastards don’t give you enough to live on anyway. Zet, dear, screw the money. I can see you’ve gone through a change of heart because ofthat book.”

‘Oh, Lottie, it’s a miracle, that book. It takes you out of this human world.”

“What do you mean?”

‘I mean it takes you out of the universe of mental projections or insulating fictions of ordinary social practice or psychological habit. It gives you elemental liberty. What really frees you from these insulating social and psychological fictions is the other fiction, of art. There really is no human life without this poetry. Ah, Lottie, I’ve been starving on symbolic logic.”

“I’ve
got
_ to read that book now,” she said.

But she didn’t get far with it. Sea books were for men, and anyway she wasn’t bookish; she was too impulsive to sit long with any book. That was Zet’s department. He would tell her all she needed to know about
Moby Dick.
_

“I’ll have to go and talk to Professor Edman.”

“As soon as you’re strong enough, go on down and quit. Just quit. All the better. What the hell do you want to be a professor for? Oh, that dog!” Katusha had gotten into a barking duel with an animal in the next yard. “Shut up, you bitch! Sometimes I really hate that lousy dog. I feel her barking right in the middle of my head.”

“Give her to the Chinese laundryman; he likes her.”

“Likes her? He’d cook her. Now look, Zet, don’t you worry about a thing. Screw that logic. Okay? You can do a hundred things. You know French, Russian, German, and you’re a real brain. We don’t need much to live on. No fancy stuff for me. I shop on Union Square. So what?”

“With that beautiful Macedonian body,” said Zet, “Klein’s is just as good as haute couture. Blessings on your bust, your belly, and your bottom.”

“If your fever goes down by the weekend, we’ll go to the country, to Giddings and Gertrude.”

“Pa will be upset when he hears I’ve dropped out of Columbia.”

“So what? I know you love him, but he’s such a grudger, you can’t please him anyway. Well, screw him, too.”

They moved downtown in 1940 and lived on Bleecker Street for a dozen years. They were soon prominent in Greenwich Village. In Chicago they had been bohemians without knowing it. In the Village Zet was identified with the avant-garde in literature and with radical politics. When the Russians invaded Finland, radical politics became absurd. Marxists debated whether the workers’ state could be imperialistic. This was too nonsensical for Zetland. Then there was the Nazi-Soviet pact, there was the war. Constantine was born during the war—Lottie wanted him to have a Balkan name. Zetland wanted to enter the service. When he behaved with spirit, Lottie was always for him, and she supported him against his father, who of course disapproved.

THE NEIGHBORS—there were in all six white people who lived at Sego Desert Lake—told one another that old Hattie could no longer make it alone. The desert life, even with a forced-air furnace in the house and butane gas brought from town in a truck, was still too difficult for her. There were women even older than Hattie in the county. Twenty miles away was Amy Walters, the gold miner’s widow. She was a hardy old girl, more wiry and tough than Hattie. Every day of the year she took a bath in the icy lake. And Amy was crazy about money and knew how to manage it, as Hattie did not. Hattie was not exactly a drunkard, but she hit the bottle pretty hard, and now she was in trouble and there was a limit to the help she could expect from even the best of neighbors.

They were fond of her, though. You couldn’t help being fond of Hattie. She was big and cheerful, puffy, comic, boastful, with a big round back and stiff, rather long legs. Before the century began she had graduated from finishing school and studied the organ in Paris. But now she didn’t know a note from a skillet. She had tantrums when she played canasta. And all that remained of her fine fair hair was frizzled along her forehead in small gray curls. Her forehead was not much wrinkled, but the skin was bluish, the color of skim milk. She walked with long strides in spite of the heaviness of her hips. With her shoulders, she pushed on, round-backed, showing the flat rubber bottoms of her shoes.

Once a week, in the same cheerful, plugging but absent way, she took off her short skirt and the dirty aviator’s jacket with the wool collar and put on a girdle, a dress, and high-heeled shoes. When she stood on these heels her fat old body trembled. She wore a big brown Rembrandt-like tarn with a tencent-store brooch, eyelike, carefully centered. She drew a straight line with lipstick on her mouth, leaving part of the upper lip pale. At the wheel of her old turret-shaped car, she drove, seemingly methodical but speeding dangerously, across forty miles of mountainous desert to buy frozen meat pies and whiskey. She went to the Laundromat and the hairdresser, and then had lunch with two martinis at the Arlington. Afterward she would often visit Marian Nabot’s Silvermine Hotel at Miller Street near skid row and pass the rest of the day gossiping and drinking with her cronies, old divorcщes like herself who had settled in the West. Hattie never gambled anymore and she didn’t care for the movies. And at five o’clock she drove back at the same speed, calmly, partly blinded by the smoke of her cigarette. The fixed cigarette gave her a watering eye.

The Rolfes and the Paces were her only white neighbors at Sego Desert Lake. There was Sam Jervis too, but he was only an old gandy walker who did odd jobs in her garden, and she did not count him. Nor did she count among her neighbors Darly, the dudes’ cowboy who worked for the Paces, nor Swede, the telegrapher. Pace had a guest ranch, and Rolfe and his wife were rich and had retired. Thus there were three good houses at the lake, Hattie’s yellow house, Pace’s, and the Rolfes’. All the rest of the population—Sam, Swede, Watchtah the section foreman, and the Mexicans and Indians and Negroes—lived in shacks and boxcars. There were very few trees, cottonwoods and box elders. Everything else, down to the shores, was sagebrush and juniper. The lake was what remained of an old sea that had covered the volcanic mountains. To the north there were some tungsten mines; to the south, fifteen miles, was an Indian village—shacks built of plywood or railroad ties.

In this barren place Hattie had lived for more than twenty years. Her first summer was spent not in a house but in an Indian wickiup on the shore. She used to say that she had watched the stars from this almost roofless shelter. After her divorce she took up with a cowboy named Wicks. Neither of them had any money—it was the Depression—and they had lived on the range, trapping coyotes for a living. Once a month they would come into town and rent a room and go on a bender. Hattie told this sadly, but also gloatingly, and with many trimmings. A thing no sooner happened to her than it was transformed into something else. “We were caught in a storm,” she said, “and we rode hard, down to the lake, and knocked on the door of the yellow house”—now her house. “Alice Parmenter took us in and let us sleep on the floor.” What had actually happened was that the wind was blowing—there had been no storm—and they were not far from the house anyway; and Alice Parmenter, who knew that Hattie and Wicks were not married, offered them separate beds; but Hattie, swaggering, had said in a loud voice, “Why get two sets of sheets dirty?” And she and her cowboy had slept in Alice’s bed while Alice had taken the sofa.

Then Wicks went away. There was never anybody like him in the sack; he was brought up in a whorehouse and the girls had taught him everything, said Hattie. She didn’t really understand what she was saying but believed that she was being Western. More than anything else she wanted to be thought of as a rough, experienced woman of the West. Still, she was a lady, too. She had good silver and good china and engraved stationery, but she kept canned beans and A-1 sauce and tuna fish and bottles of catsup and fruit salad on the library shelves of her living room. On her night table was the Bible her pious brother Angus—the other brother was a heller—had given her; but behind the little door of the commode was a bottle of bourbon. When she awoke in the night she tippled herself back to sleep. In the glove compartment of her old car she kept little sample bottles for emergencies on the road. Old Darly found them after her accident.

The accident did not happen far out in the desert as she had always feared, but very near home. She had had a few martinis with the Rolfes one evening, and as she was driving home over the railroad crossing she lost control of the car and veered off the crossing onto the tracks. The explanation she gave was that she had sneezed, and the sneeze had blinded her and made her twist the wheel. The motor was killed and all four wheels of the car sat smack on the rails. Hattie crept down from the door, high off the roadbed. A great fear took hold of her—for the car, for the future, and not only for the future but spreading back into the past—and she began to hurry on stiff legs through the sagebrush to Pace’s ranch.

Now the Paces were away on a hunting trip and had left Darly in charge; he was tending bar in the old cabin that went back to the days of the pony express, when Hattie burst in. There were two customers, a tungsten miner and his girl.

“Darly, I’m in trouble. Help me. I’ve had an accident,” said Hattie.

How the face of a man will alter when a woman has bad news to tell him! It happened now to lean old Darly; his eyes went flat and looked unwilling, his jaw moved in and out, his wrinkled cheeks began to flush, and he said, “What’s the matter—what’s happened to you now?”

“I’m stuck on the tracks. I sneezed. I lost control of the car. Tow me off, Darly. With the pickup. Before the train comes.”

Darly threw down his towel and stamped his high-heeled boots. “Now what have you gone and done?” he said. “I told you to stay home after dark.”

“Where’s Pace? Ring the fire bell and fetch Pace.”

There’s nobody on the property except me,” said the lean old man. “And I m not supposed to close the bar and you know it as well as I do.”

“Please, Darly. I can’t leave my car on the tracks.”

“Too bad!” he said. Nevertheless he moved from behind the bar. “How did you say it happened?”

“I told you, I sneezed,” said Hattie.

Everyone, as she later told it, was as drunk as sixteen thousand dollars: Darly, the miner, and the miner’s girl.

Darly was limping as he locked the door of the bar. A year before, a kick from one of Pace’s mares had broken his ribs as he was loading her into the trailer, and he hadn’t recovered from it. He was too old. But he dissembled the pain. The high-heeled narrow boots helped, and his painful bending looked like the ordinary stooping posture of a cowboy. However, Darly was not a genuine cowboy, like Pace who had grown up in the saddle. He was a latecomer from the East and until the age of forty had never been on horseback. In this respect he and Hattie were alike. They were not genuine Westerners.

Hattie hurried after him through the ranch yard.

“Damn you!” he said to her. “I got thirty bucks out of that sucker and I would have skinned him out of his whole paycheck if you minded your business. Pace is going to be sore as hell.”

“You’ve got to help me. We’re neighbors,” said Hattie.

“You’re not fit to be living out here. You can’t do it anymore. Besides, you’re swacked all the time.”

Hattie couldn’t afford to talk back. The thought of her car on the tracks made her frantic. If a freight came now and smashed it, her life at Sego Desert Lake would be finished. And where would she go then? She was not fit to live in this place. She had never made the grade at all, only seemed to have made it. And Darly—why did he say such hurtful things to her? Because he himself was sixty-eight years old, and he had no other place to go, either; he took bad treatment from Pace besides. Darly stayed because his only alternative was to go to the soldiers’ home. Moreover, the dude women would still crawl into his sack. They wanted a cowboy and they thought he was one. Why, he couldn’t even raise himself out of his bunk in the morning. And where else would he get women? “After the dude season,” she wanted to say to him, “you always have to go to the Veterans’ Hospital to get fixed up again.” But she didn’t dare offend him now.