The Collected Stories Of Saul Bellow (58 page)

The divorce was ugly. Goliger was angry, vengeful. When he moved, he stripped the house, taking away his Oriental treasures, the jade collection, the crystal, the hangings, the painted gilded elephants, the bone china, even some of the valuable jewelry he had given her and which she hadn’t had the foresight to put in the bank. He was determined to evict her from the house, too, a fine old house. He could do that if he obtained custody of the kids. The kids took little notice of the disappearance of the Indian and Venetian objects, although Trina’s lawyer argued in court that they were disoriented. Dorothea said about her nieces, “I’ll be interested to find out what gives with those two mysterious characters. As for Alfred, this is all-out war.” She thought that Katrina was too absentminded to be a warrior. “Are you taking notice, or not?”

“Of course I’m taking notice. He was always flying to an auction. Never at home. What did
he
_ do, away in India?”

Katrina was still at the dinner table when Victor’s call came. Her guest was Lieutenant Krieggstein, a member of the police force. He arrived late, because of the fierce weather, and told a story about skidding into a snowdrift and waiting for a tow truck. He had almost lost his voice and said it would take him an hour to thaw. A friend of the family, he needed no permission to bring up wood from the cellar and build a fire. The house had been built in the best age of Chicago architecture (made like a Stradivarius, said Krieggstein), and the curved tiles of the fireplace (“the old craftsmanship!”) were kingfisher blue.

“I’ve seen rough weather before, but this beats everything,” he said, and he asked for Red Devil sauce to sprinkle on his curry and drank vodka from a beer mug. His face still burned with the frost, and his eyes went on watering at the table. He said, “Oh, what a luxury that fire is on my back.”

“I hope it doesn’t set off your ammunition.”

The Lieutenant carried at least three guns. Were all plainclothes (“soft-clothes”) men armed to the teeth, or did he have more weapons because he was a little guy? He set himself up as gracious but formidable. Just challenge him and you’d see fatal action. Victor said about him that he was just this side of sanity but was always crossing the line. “A lone cowhand on both sides of the Rio Grande simultaneously.” On the whole, he took an indulgent view of Krieggstein.

It was nearly midnight in Buffalo. Katrina hadn’t expected Victor to call just yet. Thoroughly familiar with his ways, Katrina knew that her old giant must have had a disappointing evening, had probably thrown himself disgusted on the bed in the Hilton, more than half his clothing on the floor and a pint of Black Label nearby to “keep the auxiliary engines going.” The trip was harder than he was willing to admit. Beila, his wife, had advised him not to take it, but her opinions didn’t count. A subordinate plant manager didn’t tell the chairman of the board what to do. He was off to see Katrina. Lecturing, of course, was his pretext. “I promised those guys,” he said. Not entirely a pretext, however. Greatly in demand, he got high fees. Tonight he had spoken at the state university, and tomorrow he was speaking to a group of executives in Chicago. Buffalo was a combined operation. The Wulpys’ youngest daughter, Vanessa, who was an undergraduate there, was having problems. For Victor, family problems could never be what they were for other people—he wouldn’t
have
_ them. Vanessa was being provocative and he was irritated.

Well, when the phone rang, Katrina said, “There’s Victor. A little early. This may take a while.” With Krieggstein you needn’t stand on ceremony. Dinner had ended, and if she was too long on the phone he could let himself out. A large heavy beauty, shapely (only just within the limits), Katrina left the dining room as rapidly as her style of movement allowed. She released the catch of the swinging kitchen door. Of course Krieggstein meant to stay and to eavesdrop. Her affair was no secret and he considered himself her confidant. He had every qualification for this: he was a cop, and cops saw it all; he was a Pacific-war hero; and he was her scout’s-honor friend. Listening, he turned his thick parboiled face to the fire, made his plump legs comfortable, crossed his short arms over his cardigan.

“How has it been, Victor?” said Katrina. How tired winter travel had made him was what she had to determine from the pitch of his voice and his choice of words. This must have been an exceptionally hard trip. It was strenuous labor for a man of his size, and with a surgically fused knee, to pole his way upon a walking stick against the human tides of airports. Wearing his Greek sea captain’s cap, he was all the more conspicuous. He made his way everywhere with a look of willing acceptance and wit. He was on good terms with his handicaps (a lifelong, daily familiarity with pain) and did not complain about going it alone. Other famous old men had helpers. She had heard that Henry Moore kept no fewer than six assistants. Victor had nobody. His life had assumed a crazy intensity that could not be shared. Secrecy was necessary, obviously. At the heart of so much that was obvious was an unyielding mystery: Why
did
_ he? Katrina’s answer was Love. Victor wouldn’t say, declined to give an answer. Perhaps he hadn’t yet found the core of the question.

Katrina thought him mysterious-looking, too. Beneath the bill of the Greek or Lenin-style cap there was a sort of millipede tangle about the eyes. His eyes were long, extending curiously into the temples. His cheeks were as red in sickness as in health; he was almost never pale. He carried himself with admirable, nonposturing, tilted grace, big but without heaviness. Not a bulky figure. He had style. You could, if you liked, call him an old bohemian, but such classifications did not take you far. No category could hold Victor.

The traveling-celebrity bit was very tiring. You flew in and you were met at the airport by people you didn’t know and who put you under a strain because they wanted to be memorable individually, catch your attention, ingratiate themselves, provoke, flatter—it all came to the same thing. Driving from the airport, you were locked in a car with them for nearly an hour. Then there were drinks—a cocktail hubbub. After four or five martinis you went in to dinner and were seated between two women, not always attractive. You had to remember their names, make conversation, give them equal time. You might as well be running for office, you had to shake so many hands. You ate your prime rib and drank wine, and before you had unfolded your speech on the lectern, you were already tuckered out. You shouldn’t fight all this, said Victor; to fight it only tired you more. But normally Victor thrived on noise, drink, and the conversation of strangers. He had so much to say that he overwhelmed everybody who approached him. In the full blast of a cocktail party he was able to hear everything and to make himself heard; his tenor voice was positively fifelike when he made an important point, and he was superarticulate.

If after his lecture a good discussion developed, he’d be up half the night drinking and talking. That was what he loved, and to be abed before midnight was a defeat. So he was either uncharacteristically fatigued or the evening had been a drag. Stupid things must have been said to him. And here he was, a man who had associated with Andrщ Breton, Duchamp, the stars of his generation, weary to the bone, in frozen Buffalo (you could picture Niagara Falls more than half iced over), checking in with a girlfriend in Evanston, Illinois. Add to the list of bad circumstances his detestation of empty hours in hotel rooms. Add also that he had probably taken off his pants, as she had seen him do in this mood, and thrown them at the wall, plus his big shoes, and his shirt made into a ball. He had his dudgeons, especially when there hadn’t been a single sign of intelligence or entertainment. Now for comfort (or was it out of irritation) he telephoned Katrina. Most likely he had had a couple of drinks, lying naked, passing his hand over the hair of his chest, which sometimes seemed to soothe him. Except for his socks, he would then resemble the old men that Picasso had put into his late erotic engravings. Victor himself had written about the painter-and-model series done at Mougins in 1968, ferocious scribbles of satyr artists and wide-open odalisques. Through peepholes aged wrinkled kings spied on gigantic copulations. (Victor was by turns the painter-partner and the aged king.) Katrina’s pretty lopsidedness might have suited Picasso’s taste. (Victor, by the way, was no great admirer of Picasso.)

“So Buffalo wasn’t a success?”

“Buffalo! Hell, I can’t see any reason why it exists.”

“But you said you had to stop to see Vanessa.”

“That’s another ordeal I can do without. We’re having breakfast at seven.”

“And your lecture?”

“I read them my paper on Marx’s
The Eighteenth Brumaire.
_ I thought, for a university crowd…”

“Well, tomorrow will be more important, more interesting,” said Katrina.

Victor had been invited to address the Executives Association, an organization of bankers, economists, former presidential advisers, National Security Council types. Victor assured her that this was a far more important outfit than the overpublicized Trilateral Commission, which, he said, was a front organization using ex-presidents and other exploded stars to divert attention from real operations. The guys who were bringing him to Chicago wanted him to talk about “Culture and Politics, East and West.” Much they cared about art and culture, said Victor. But they sensed that it had to be dealt with; challenging powers were ascribed to it, nothing immediate or worrisome, but one ought to know what intellectuals were up to. “They’ve listened to professors and other pseudoexperts,” said Victor, “and maybe they believe they should send for an old Jewish character. Pay him his price and he’ll tell you without fakery what it’s all about.” The power of big-shot executives wouldn’t overawe him. Those people, he said, were made of Styrofoam. He was gratified nevertheless. They had asked for the best, and that was himself—a realistic judgment, and virtually free from vanity. Katrina estimated that he would pick up a ten-thousand-dollar fee. “I don’t expect the kind of dough that Kissinger gets, or Haig, although I’ll give better value,” he told her. He didn’t mention a figure, though. Dotey, no bad observer, said that he’d talk freely about anything in the world but money—
his
_ money.

Dotey’s observations, however, were commonplace. She spoke with what Katrina had learned to call
ressentiment
_—from behind a screen of grievances. What could a person like Dotey understand about a man like Victor, whom she called “that gimpy giant”? What if this giant should have been in his time one of the handsomest men ever made? What if he should still have exquisite toes and fingers; a silken scrotum that he might even now (as he held the phone) be touching, leading out the longest hairs—his unconscious habit when he lay in bed? What, moreover, if he should be a mine of knowledge, a treasury of insights in all matters concerning the real needs and interests of modern human beings? Could a Dorothea evaluate the
release
_ offered to a woman by such an extraordinary person, the independence? Could she feel what it meant to be free from so
much, junk?
_

“By the way, Victor,” said Katrina. “Do you remember the notes you dictated over the phone for use, maybe, tomorrow? I typed them up for you. If you need them, I’ll have them with me when I meet you at O’Hare in the morning.”

“I’ve had a different thought,” said Victor. “How would it be if you were to fly here?”

“Me? Fly to Buffalo?”

‘That’s right. You join me, and we’ll go on to Chicago together.”

Immediately all of Katrina’s warmest expectations were reversed, and up from the bottom there seeped instead every kind of dreariness imaginable. While Victor was in the air in the morning, she wouldn’t be preparing, treating herself to a long bath, then putting on her pine-green knitted Vivanti suit and applying the Cabochard, his favorite perfume. She would be up until two A. M., improvising, trying to make arrangements, canceling her appointment downtown, setting her clock for five A. M. She hated to get up while it was still night.

There must be a sensible explanation for this, but Katrina couldn’t bring herself to ask what it was—like “What’s wrong? Are you sick?” She had unbearable questions to put to herself, too: Will I have to take him to the hospital?… Why me? His daughter is there. Does he need emergency surgery? Back to all the horrible stuff that had happened at Mass. General? A love that began with passionate embraces ending with barium X rays, heavy drugs, bad smells? The grim wife coming back to take control?

Don’t go so fast, Katrina checked herself. She regrouped and reentered her feelings at a different place. He was completely by himself and was afraid that he might start to crumble in his plane seat: a man like Victor, who was as close to being a prince as you could be (in what he described as “this bungled age”), such a man having to telephone a girl—and to Victor, when you came right down to it, she was
a
_ girl, one of many (although she was pretty sure she had beaten the rest of the field). He had to appeal to a girl (“I’ve had a different thought”) and expose his weakness to her.

What was necessary now was to speak as usual, so that when he said, “I had the travel desk make a reservation for you, if you want to use it—are you there?” she answered, “Let me find a pen that writes.” A perfectly good pen hung on a string. What she needed was to collect herself while she thought of an alternative. She wasn’t clever enough to come up with anything, so she began to print out the numbers he gave her. Heavyhearted? Of course she was. She was forced to consider her position from a “worst case” point of view. A North Shore mother of two, in a bad, a deteriorating marriage, had begun to be available sexually to visitors. Selectively. It was true that a couple of wild mistakes had occurred. But then a godsend, Victor, turned up.

In long discussions with her analyst (whom she no longer needed), she had learned how central her father was in all this, in the formation or deformation of her character. Until she was ten years old she had known nothing but kindness from her daddy. Then, with the first hints of puberty, her troubles began. Exasperated with her, he said she was putting on a guinea-pig look. He called her a con artist. She was doing the farmer’s-daughter-traveling-salesman bit. “That puzzled expression, as if you can’t remember whether a dozen is eleven or thirteen. And what do you suppose happens with the thirteenth egg, hey? Pretty soon you’ll let a stranger lead you into the broom closet and take off your panties.” Well! Thank you, Daddy, for all the suggestions you planted in a child’s mind. Predictably she began to be sly and steal pleasure, and she did play the farmer’s daughter, adapting and modifying until she became the mature Katrina. In the end (a blessed miracle) it worked out for the best, for the result was just what had attracted Victor—an avant-garde personality who happened to be crazy about just this erotic mixture. Petty bourgeois sexuality, and retrograde petty bourgeois at that, happened to turn Victor on. So here was this suburban broad, the clichщ of her father’s loaded forebodings: call her what you liked—voluptuary, luxurious beauty, confused sexpot, carnal idiot with piano legs, her looks (mouth half open or half shut) meaning everything or nothing. Just this grace-in-clumsiness was the aphrodisiac of one of the intellectual captains of the modern world. She dismissed the suggestion (Dotey’s suggestion) that it was his decline that had brought her into his life, that she appeared when he was old, failing, in a state of desperation or erotic bondage. And it was true that any day now the earth would open underfoot and he’d be gone.