The Collected Stories Of Saul Bellow (69 page)

“But aren’t you lucid?”

“That’s my
mental
_ lucidity. I’ve been having lucid impressions—like dreams, visions—instead of lucid ideas.”

“What’s this about?”

“Well, there’s shared knowledge that we don’t talk about. That deaf deep mining.”

“Like what?”

“Cryptic persistent suggestions: the dead are not really
dead.
_ Or, we don’t create thoughts, as that movie drip suggested. A thought
is
_ real, already created, and a real thought can pay you a visit. I think I understand why this happens to me. After so many years in the arts, you begin to assume that the value of life is bound up with the value of art. And there is no rational basis for this. Then you begin to suspect that it’s the ‘rational’ that lacks real meaning. Rationality would argue back that it’s the weakening of the organism that suggests this. A stupid argument.” Victor refrained from speaking of the erotic side of this—magical, aesthetic, erotic—or of what this final flare-up of eroticism might mean. It might mean that he was paying out from his last fibers for lucidity of impression and for sexual confirmation of the fact that he still existed. But full strength, strong fibers, only made you more capable of lying to yourself, of maintaining the
mauvaise foi,
_ the false description of your personal reality. He didn’t mention to Katrina the underground music which signified (had signified to Mark Antony) that the god Hercules was going away.

He changed the subject. He said to Katrina, “It’s a real laugh that Wrangel should mix me up in his mind with FDR.”

Roosevelt, too, was dying at a moment when to have strength was more necessary than ever. And hadn’t there been a woman with him at Warm Springs when he had his brain hemorrhage?

“Didn’t it ever occur to you?” said Katrina.

“It occurred, but I didn’t encourage the thought. Stalin made a complete fool of the man. Those trips to Teheran and Yalta must have been the death of him. They were ruinous physically. I’m certain that Stalin meant to hasten his death. Terrible journeys. Roosevelt felt challenged to demonstrate his vigor. Stalin didn’t budge. Roosevelt let himself be destroyed, proving his strength as chief of a great power, and also his ‘nobility.’ “

Katrina, who had moved her round face closer—a girl posing for a “sweetheart snapshot,” cheek to cheek—said, “Aren’t you cold? Wouldn’t you like me to pull the covers over you? No? At least slide your fingers under me to warm up.”

To encourage him she turned on her side. A gambit she could always count on—the smooth shape of her buttocks, their crшme de Chantilly whiteness. He always laughed when she offered herself this way, and put out his big, delicate hands. Something of a tough guy he really was, and particularly with age distortions—the wrecked Picasso Silenus reaching toward the nude beauty. She felt a sort of aristocratic delicacy from him even when he was manipulating these round forms of hers. It was really a bit crazy, the pride she took in her bottom. He matched up the freckles on each cheek—she had two prominent birthmarks—as if they were eyes. “Now you’re squinting. Now you’re crosseyed. Now you’re planning a conspiracy.” Victor paused and said, “This is what little Wrangel was saying about cartoons and abstractions, isn’t it? Making these faces?” Then he smoothed her gently and said, “It’s no figure of speech to say that your figure leaves me speechless.”

It was at this moment that the telephone began to ring, again and again—merciless. It was the desk. Their plane was just now landing. The limousine had started out. They were to be downstairs in five minutes.

They waited in the cold, under the bright lights. Victor had his stick and the mariner’s cap—the broad mustache, the wonderful face, the noble ease in all circumstances. The Thinker Prince. Never quite up to his great standard, she felt just a little clumsy beside him. She was in charge of the damned fiddle, too. To hold an instrument she couldn’t play. It turned her into a native bearer. She should set it on her head. And there they were on the edges of Detroit, standing on one of its crusts of light. Just like the other blasted cities of the northern constellation—Buffalo, Cleveland, Chicago, St. Louis—all those fields of ruin that looked so golden and beautiful by night.

“This
_ is no limousine,” said Victor, irritated, when the car stopped. “It’s a goddamn compact Honda.”

But he made no further fuss about it. Opening the door of the car and taking a grip on the edge of the roof, he began to install himself in the front seat. First there was the stiff leg to get in, over on the driver’s end, by the brake, and then he eased in his head and his huge back so that, as he turned, the car was crammed to the top. Then he descended into the seat with patient, clever labor. It was like a difficult intromission. But as soon as he was in place, and while Katrina was settling herself in the back, he was already talking. Nerving himself for the approaching lecture, tuning up? “Did you ever get through the Cщline book I gave you?”

“The
Journey?
_ I did, finally.”

“It’s not agreeable, but it is important. It’s one of those French things I’ve had on my mind.”

“Like the Baudelaire?”

“Right.” The driver had taken off swiftly by a dark side road, along fences. Victor made an effort to turn in the small seat; he wanted to look at her. Apparently he wished to make a statement not only in words but also with his face. “Didn’t you think Cщline was truly terrifying? He uses the language that people everywhere really use. He expresses the ideas and feelings they really share.”

“Last time we spoke about it you said those were the ideas that made France collapse in 1940. And that the Germans also had those same ideas.”

“I don’t think that was exactly what I said. Talking about nihilism…”

Why had he asked her to read that book? Toward the end of it—a nightmare—a certain adventurer named Robinson refused to tell a woman that he loved her, and this “loving” woman, enraged, had shot him dead. Not even when she pointed the gun at him in the taxicab could she make him say the words “I love you.” The “loving” woman was really a maniac, while the man, the “lover,” although he was himself a crook, a deadbeat, a murderer, had one shred of honor left, and that, too, was in the terminal stage. Better dead than carried off for life by this loony ogress whom he would have to pretend to “love.” It wasn’t so much the book that had shocked Katrina—a book was only a book—but the fact that he, Victor, had told her to read it. Of course, he was always pushing the widest possible perspective of historical reality. The whole universe was his field of operations. A cosmopolitan in the fullest sense, a giant of comprehension, he was located in the central command post of comprehension. “Face the destructive facts. No palliatives,” was the kind ofthing he said.

“That book was next door to the murder camps,” she said.

“I don’t deny it.”

“Well, back at the hotel you said that alert people everywhere were recognizing the same facts. But same isn’t quite the way it was in the Cщline book. Not even for you, Victor.”

There was no time to answer. The car had stopped at the small private-aircraft building. When the driver ran from the front seat to open her door, she thought his face was distorted. Maybe it was only the cold that made him grimace. Extricating himself from the car, Victor again caught at the roof and hopped backward, drawing out the bad leg.

They entered the overilluminated shack. At the counter, where phones were jingling, Trina gave the name Wulpy to the dispatcher. The man said, “Yes, your Cessna is on the ground. It’ll taxi up in a few minutes.”

She passed the news to Victor, who nodded but went on talking. “I’ll grant you, the French had been had by their ideology. An ideology is a spell cast by the ruling class, a net of binding falsehoods, and the discovery of this can throw people into a rage. That’s why Cщline is violent.”

“People?
Some
_ people.”

You have a love affair and then you ask your ladylove to read a book to discredit love, and it’s the most extreme book you can select. That’s some valentine.

Her ostrich boots gave her no sense of elegance as she preceded him into the Cessna. She felt clumsy and thick, every graceless thing that a woman can be, and she carried Vanessa’s instrument across her chest. By the light of the lurid revolving bubble on the fuselage, she watched Victor being assisted into the plane. The two-man crew received Victor and Katrina with particular consideration. This was how the personnel were trained for these executive ferrying jobs.

Passengers were guests. Would they care for coffee? And fresh doughnuts, or powdered bismarcks? Or would they prefer whiskey? The afternoon papers hadn’t been available when they left Chicago. They did, however, have
Barrons
_ and the
Wall Street Journal.
_ The seats were luxurious—as much legroom as you liked, excellent reading lights. Here was the panel with its many switches. Neither of the passengers cared to read just now.

The pilot said, “We’ll be landing at Midway, and you’ll get a helicopter ride to Meigs.”

“Well, this is more like it,” said Victor. “You see?” She translated “You see?” as an assertion that he had not misled her. He had sent for her, and he was returning her to Chicago. He had the power to make good all assurances. He raised his whiskey glass. We’ll drink to you and me. Something like a smile passed over his face, but he was also ruffled, moody. His eyes, those narrow canals, were black with mortal injury. None of these powers—summoning special machines, commanding special privileges—really seemed to mean a thing. Doodads for a canary’s cage. “Oh, yes, you’re a pilot yourself,” he remembered.

“Not one of these planes,” said Katrina. She held up her wristwatch to the light. Ysole would have left the house by now.

Suddenly the silence of the cabin was torn by a furious roar. Nothing could be heard. The plane bumped across the icy seams of the field. Then came the clean run and they were (thank God!) airborne. Their course would take them southwest across Lake Michigan. It was just as well in this weather that the water should be invisible. The parlorlike neatness of the cabin was meant to give a sense of safety. She tasted the coffee—it was freeze-dried, it was not hot. When she bit into the jelly doughnut, she liked the fragrance of the fried dough but not the cold jelly that gushed out.

He may have had no special intention in giving her the Cщline book to read. If so, why did he bring it up now? And what of the dowager Beila, to whom Vanessa had recommended the book on homosexual foreplay? They
were
_ a bookish family, weren’t they. But this was to misread Beila completely. You could no more think of her that way than you could think of Queen Victoria. And Victor did not encourage discussions of Beila. Sometimes he spoke of “wives of a certain kind.”

“Perfect happiness for wives of a certain kind is to immobilize their husbands.” The suggestion was that a man in his seventies who had barely survived Mass. General and had a bad leg was a candidate for immobilization. You could as easily immobilize Niagara Falls. A perfectly objective judgment of Beila, removing all rivalry and guilt, was that she behaved with dignity. When it looked as if Victor was not going to make it at Mass. General, Beila had asked him whether he wanted to see Katrina, who was hiding in one of the waiting rooms. Victor did want to see her, and Beila had sent for her, and had withdrawn from the room also, to let them take leave of each other. Then Katrina and Victor had gripped hands. He seemed unable to speak. She wept with heartbreak. She told him that she would always love him. He held her hand fast and said, “This is it, kid.” His tongue was impeded, but he was earnest and clear, she remembered. And since then, she thought how important it was that her claim to access should be affirmed, and that his feeling for her should be acknowledged. It wasn’t just another adultery. She wasn’t one of his casual women. Before death, his emotions were open, and she came—when she rushed in she was bursting. Her suffering was conceded its rights. Their relationship was certified; it took a sort of formal imprint from the sickroom. Last farewells. He was dying. When he released her hand, meaning that it was time to go—too much for him, perhaps, too painful—and she went out sobbing, she saw the distant significant figure of Beila down the corridor, watching or studying her.

Well, what had Beila’s generosity achieved, when Victor was on his feet again? It only made matters simpler for the lovers. Then this creepy, rabbinical, fiddling, meddling, and bratty daughter advised a mother in her late sixties to learn to tickle and to suck, use advanced techniques of lewdness. (“For two cents I’d throw her fiddle right into the lake! Little bitch!”) Beila needed all the dignity she could muster. And especially with a husband whose description might be: “Others abide our judgment, thou art free!” Finally Victor himself bringing up the ultimate, hellish judgment on “love”—that love was something _dщgueulasse.__ Like spoiled meat; dogs would walk away from it, but “lovers” poured out some “tenderness sauce” and then it became a dainty dish to set before the king—handing Katrina such a book to read.

That wasn’t what he had been like in Mass. General, with death on top of him.

It occurred to her that his aim was to desensitize her feelings so that when he died—and he felt it coming—she would suffer less.

But he did play rough. A few years ago he had suggested that Joe So-and-so, a nice young poet, very pretty, too, no ball of fire, though, was attentive to her. ‘Do you think you might like him?” That may have been a test. Just as possibly it was an attempt to get rid of her, and his estimation of So-and-so’s talent (no secret that there
was
_ no talent) also told Katrina how he ranked her on a realistic scale—a dumpy sexpot, varicose veins, uneven gum line, crшme de Chantilly inner thighs but otherwise no great shakes. Her oddities happened to suit him, Victor. But there were idiosyncrasies, and then there were real standards. Since his miraculous recovery he had made no offensive matchmaking suggestions. He even seemed to suspect, jealously, that she was looking around, in the glamour world to which he had introduced her. She wouldn’t have been surprised if, by insulting Wrangel and trying to make her a party to the insult, Victor had tried to eliminate this celebrity producer as a rival. He was a very cunning man, Victor. This afternoon’s sex, for instance, had it been desire or had it been payola? No, no; even Dotey said, “You’re his only turn-on.” That was the truth. She brought Victor to life again. The
caresse qui fait revivre les morts.
_ The man’s sexual resurrection.