The Collected Stories Of Saul Bellow (61 page)

When Katrina, ready to go, came into the kitchen in her fleece-lined coat, the girls were still sitting over their granola. The milk had turned brown while they dawdled. “I’m leaving a list on the bulletin board, tell Ysole. I’ll see you after school.” No reply. Katrina left the house half unwilling to admit how good it was to go away, how glad she would be to reach O’Hare, how wonderful it would be to make a flight even though Victor, waiting in Buffalo, might be sick.

The jet engines sucked and snarled up the frozen air; the huge plane lifted; the gray ground skidded away and you rose past hangars, over factories, ponds, bungalows, football fields, the stitched incisions of railroad tracks curving through the snow. And then the skyscraper community to the south. On an invisible sidewalk beneath, your little daughters walking to school might hear the engines, unaware that their mummy overflew them. Now the gray water of the great lake appeared below with all its stresses, wind patterns, whitecaps. Goodbye. Being above the clouds always made Katrina tranquil. Then—_bing!__—the lucid sunlight coming through infinite space (refrigerated blackness, they said) filled the cabin with warmth and color. In a book by Kandinsky she had once picked up in Victor’s room, she had learned that the painter, in a remote part of Russia where the interiors of houses were decorated in an icon style, had concluded that a painting, too, ought to be an interior, and that the artist should induce the viewer to enter in. Who wouldn’t rather? she thought. Drinking coffee above the state of Michigan, Katrina had her single hour of calm and luxury. The plane was almost empty.

There were even some thoughts about her elephant project. Would she or wouldn’t she finish it?

In Katrina’s story the elephant, a female, had been leased as a smart promotional idea to push the sale of Indian toys on the fifth floor of a department store. The animal’s trainer had had trouble getting her into the freight elevator. After testing the floor with one foot and finding it shaky, she had balked, but Nirad, the Indian mahout, had persuaded her at last to get in. Once in the toy department she had had a heavenly time. Sales were out of sight. Margey was the creature’s name, but the papers, which were full of her, called her Largey. The management was enthusiastic. But when the month ended and Margey-Largey was led again to the freight elevator and made the hoof test, nothing could induce her to enter. Now there was an elephant in the top story of a department store on Wabash Avenue, and no one could think of a way to get her out. There were management conferences and powwows. Experts were called in. Legions of inventive cranks flooded the lines with suggestions. Open the roof and lift out the animal with a crane? Remove a wall and have her lowered by piano movers? Drug her and stow her unconscious in the freight elevator? But how could you pick her up when she was etherized? The Humane Society objected. The circus from which Margey-Largey had been rented had to leave town and held the department store to its contract. Nirad the mahout was frantic. The great creature was in misery, suffered from insomnia. Were there no solutions? Katrina wasn’t quite inventive enough to bring it off. Inspiration simply wouldn’t come. Krieggstein wondered whether the armed forces might not have a jumbo-sized helicopter. Or if the store had a central gallery or well like Marshall Field’s. Katrina after two or three attempts had stopped trying to discuss this with Victor. You didn’t pester him with your nonsense. There was a measure of the difference between Victor and Krieggstein.

If he had been sick in earnest, Victor would have canceled the lecture, so he must have sent for her because he longed to see her (the most desirable maximum), or simply because he needed company. These reasonable conclusions made her comfortable, and for about an hour she rode through the bright sky as if she
were
_ inside a painting. Then, just east of Cleveland, the light began to die away, which meant that the plane was descending. Darkness returned. Beneath her was Lake Erie—an open toilet, she had heard an environmentalist call it. And now the jet was gliding into gray Buffalo, and she was growing agitated. Why was she sent for? Because he was sick and old, in spite of the immortality that he seemed wrapped in, and it was Katrina’s fault that he was on the road. He did it for her sake. He didn’t travel with assistants (like Henry Moore or other dignitaries of the same rank) because a sexual romance imposed secrecy; because Alfred was gunning for her—Alfred who had always outclassed and outsmarted her and who was incensed by this turnaround. And if Alfred were to win his case, Victor would have Katrina on his hands. But would he accept her? She felt it would never come to that.

After landing in Buffalo, she stopped in the ladies’ room and when she looked herself over she was far from satisfied with the thickness of her face and her agitated eyes. She put on lipstick (Alfred’s rage was burning and smoking on the horizon and she was applying lipstick). She did what she could with her comb and went out to get directions to the first-class lounge.

Victor never flew first-class—why waste money? He only used the facilities. The executives in first were not his type. He had always lived like an artist, and therefore belonged in the rear cabin. Owing to his bum knee, he did claim early seating, together with nursing infants and paraplegics. No display of infirmity, but he needed an aisle seat for his rigid leg. What was true was that he assumed a kind of presidential immunity from all inconveniences. For some reason this was especially galling to Dorothea, and she took a Who-the-hell-is-he! tone when she said, “He takes everything for granted. When he came to Northwestern—that fatal visit!—he borrowed a jalopy and wouldn’t even put out fifty bucks for a battery, but every day phoned some sucker to come with cables and give him a jump. And here’s a man who must be worth upward of a million in modern paintings alone.”

“I don’t know,” said Katrina. (At her stubbornest she lowered her eyes, and when she looked as if she were submitting, she resisted most.) “Victor
really
_ believes in equality. But I don’t think that special consideration, in his case, is out of line.”

When Victor appeared at a party, true enough, people cleared a path for him, and a hassock was brought and a drink put in his hand. As he took it, there was no break in his conversation. Even his super-rich friends were glad to put themselves out for him. Cars were sent. Apartments (in places like the Waldorf) were available, of which he seldom availed himself. An old-style Villager, he kept a room to write in on Sullivan Street, among Italian neighbors, and while he was working he would pick up a lump of provolone and scraps from the bread box, drink whiskey or coffee from his Pyrex measuring cup, lie on his bed (the sheets were maybe changed annually) to refine his thoughts, passing them through his mind as if the mind were a succession of high-energy chambers. It was the thinking that mattered. He had those thinking dark eyes shining inside the densely fringed lids, big diabolical brows, authoritative not unkindly. The eyes were set, or
let
_ into his cheeks, at an odd angle. The motif of the odd angle appeared in many forms. And on Sullivan Street he required no special consideration. He bought his own salami and cheese, cigarettes, in the Italian grocery, carried them to his third-floor walk-up (rear), working until drink time, perfectly independent. Uptown, he might accept a lift in a limousine. In the soundproof glass cabinet of a Rolls, Katrina had once heard him talking during a half-hour ride downtown with a billionaire Berliner. (Escaped from the Nazis in the thirties with patents for synthetic rubber, he had bought dozens of Matisses, cheap.) Victor was being serious with him, and Katrina had tried to keep track of the subjects covered between Seventy-sixth Street and Washington Square: the politics of modern Germany from the Holy Roman Empire through the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact; what surrealist communism had
really
_ been about; Kiesler’s architecture; Hans Hofmann’s influence; what limits were set by liberal democracy for the development of the arts. Three or four other wonderful topics she couldn’t remember. Various views on the crises in economics, cold war, metaphysics, sexaphysics. The clever, lucky old Berlin Jew, whose head was like a round sourdough loaf, all uneven and dusted with flour, had asked the right questions. It wasn’t as if Victor had been singing for his ride. He didn’t do that sort ofthing.

Dorothea tried, and tried too hard, to find the worst possible word for Victor. She would say, “He’s a Tartuffe.”

“You called me Madame Bovary,” said Katrina. “What kind of a pair does that make us?”

Dotey, you got your B. A. fair and square. Now stick to plastic bags.

Such comments, tactfully censored, seemed to swell out Katrina’s lips. You often saw a sort of silent play about her mouth. Interpreted, it told you that Victor was a real big shot, and that she was proud of—well, of their special intimacy. He confided in her. She knew his true opinions. They were conspirators. She was with him in his lighthearted, quick-moving detachment from everything that people (almost all of them) were attached to. In a public-opinion country, he made his own opinions. Katrina was enrolled as his only pupil. She paid her tuition with joy.

This at least was one possible summary of their relations, the one she liked best.

Passing down the glass-walled corridors of the airport, Katrina didn’t like the look of the sky—a kind of colic in the clouds, and snow gusts spitting and twisting on the fields of concrete. Traffic, however, was normal. Planes were rolling in, trundling toward the runways. The look of the sky was wicked, but you didn’t want to translate your anxieties into weather conditions. Anyway, the weather was shut out when you entered the VIP lounge. First-class lounges were always inner rooms, low-lighted, zones of quiet and repose. Drinks were free, and Victor, holding a glass, rested his legs on a coffee table. His stick was wedged beside him in sofa cushions. The action of the whiskey wasn’t sufficient, for his yellow-green corduroy car coat was zippered and buttoned for warmth. As she kissed him the Cabochard fragrance puffed from her dress, scarf, throat—she could smell it herself. Then they looked each other in the face to see what was up. She wouldn’t have said that he was sick—he didn’t look it, and he didn’t have about him the sick flavor that had become familiar to her during his illness.
That
_ at least! So there was no cause for panic. He was, however, out of sorts, definitely—something was working at him, like vexation, disgust. She knew the power of his silent glooms. Several objects had been deposited at the side of the sofa. His duffel bag she knew; heavy canvas, stained, it might have contained a plumber’s tools, but there was something else with it, just around the corner.

Well, I was sent for, and I came. Was I needed, or was it extreme tetchiness?

“Right on the dot,” she said, turning her watch on the wrist.

“Good.”

“All I have to do is make it back.”

“I see no reason why you shouldn’t. It didn’t give you a lot of trouble to arrange, did it?”

“Only ducking a date with the court psychiatrist, and chancing the usual heat from Alfred.”

“Such behavior in this day and age,” said Victor. “Why does your husband have to interpose himself as if
he
_ were a principal, and behave like a grand-opera lunatic?”

“Well, you know, Victor. Alfred always had lots of assurance, but rivalry with you was more than his selfesteem could bear.”

Victor was not the type to be interested in personality troubles. Insofar as they were nothing but personal, he cared for nobody’s troubles. That included his own.

“What have you got there, with your duffel bag?”

“I’ll tell you as soon as we’ve ordered you some whiskey.” Early drinking was unusual; it meant he needed an extra boost. When his arm was raised, the signal couldn’t be overlooked, and the hostess came right over. In the old Mediterranean or in Asia, you might have found examples of Victor’s physical type. He towered. He also tilted, on account of the leg. Katrina had never determined exactly what was the matter with it, medically. For drainage it was punctured in two places, right through the flesh. Sometimes there was a deposit around the holes, and it was granular, like brown sugar. That took getting used to, just a lit-tie. He made jokes about his size. He said he was too big for the subtler human operations. He would point out the mammoths, they hadn’t made it, and he would note how many geniuses were little guys. But that was just talk. At heart he was pleased with the way he was. Nothing like a mammoth. He was still one of the most dramatic-looking men in the world, and besides, as she had reason to know, his nervous reactions were very fine. A face like Victor’s might have been put on the cover of a book about the ancient world: the powerful horizontal planes—forehead, cheekbones, the intelligent long eyes, the brows kinky with age now, and with tufts that could be wicked. His mouth was large, and the cropped mustache was broad. By the way the entire face expanded when he spoke emphatically, you recognized that he was a kind of tyrant in thought. His cheekbones were red, like those of an actor in makeup; the sharp color hadn’t left him even when he was on the critical list. It seemed a mistake that he should be dying. Besides, he was so big that you wondered what he was doing in a bed meant for ordinary patients, but when he opened his eyes, those narrow visual canals, the message was, “I’m dying!” Still, only a couple of months later he was back in circulation, eating and drinking, writing critical pieces—in full charge. A formidable person, Victor Wulpy. Even the way he gimped was formidable, not as if he was dragging his leg but as if he were kicking things out of the way. All of Victor’s respect was reserved for people who lived out their
idea.
_ For whether or not you were aware of it, you had one, high or low, keen or stupid. He came on like the king of something—of the Jews perhaps. By and by, you became aware of a top-and-bottom contrast in Victor; he was not above as he was below. In the simplest terms, his shoes were used up and he wore his pants negligently, but when his second drink had warmed him and he took off the corduroy coat, he uncovered one of his typical shirts. It resembled one of Paul Klee’s canvases, those that were filled with tiny rectilinear forms—green, ruby, yellow, violet, washed out but still beautiful. His large trunk was one warm artwork. After all, he was a chieftain and pundit in the art world, a powerful man; even his oddities (naturally) had power. Kingly, artistic, democratic, he had been around forever. He was withering, though. But women were after him, even now.