Saul Bellow - The Victim

“You ought to realize that I’m not entirely…” he stumbled, “that I’m not entirely under control.” The slant of the shadows on his pale, fleshy face made it look infirm. The marks beneath his eyes brought to Leventhal’s mind the bruises under the skin of an apple. “Things get away from me. I’m not trying to excuse myself. But you wouldn’t believe how much…”

“Say, nowadays you can believe almost anything,” Leven-thal said, and he laughed a little but without relish.

With a grave look, Allbee appealed to him not to persist in this. His brows went up, he pushed his fingers through his dirtyish blond hair, and Leventhal remarked to himself that there was an element of performance in all that he was doing. But suddenly he had a strange, close consciousness of Allbee, of his face and body, a feeling of intimate nearness such as he had experienced in the zoo when he had imagined himself at Allbee’s back, seeing with microscopic fineness the lines in his skin, and the smallest of his hairs, and breathing in his odor. The same sensations were repeated; he could nearly feel the weight of his body and the contact of his clothes. Even more, the actuality of his face, loose in the cheeks, firm in the forehead and jaws, struck him, the distinctness of it; and the look of recognition. Allbee bent on him duplicated the look in his own. He was sure of that. Nevertheless he kept alive in his mind the thought that Allbee hated him, and his judgment, although it was numbed by his curious emotion of closeness — for it was an emotion — did not desert him. His burly, keen-set figure did not budge from the doorway any more than the spokes in the skylight moved.

“Will you let me in?” Allbee said at last.

“What for?”

“I want to talk to you.”

“I told you, it’s late.”

“It’s late for you, but it’s all the same to me what time it is. You said you’d help me.”

“I don’t want to start discussing your future now. Go away.”

“It’s the present, not the future.”

Leventhal felt inexplicably weak against him. “Am I forgetting all the things he said to me, how mad I was, all that ugly stuff?” he asked himself. And it was true that his sense of injury had not remained sharp; his self-reproach did not make it any sharper. The hall was airless, just as Mickey’s room had been. He was starved for a free breath of air. His eyes were hot and tired, and the feeling of closeness seemed to have superseded and made faint all other feelings.

“What, the present?” he said.

“Well, you can go in, turn off the lights, and go to sleep,” said Allbee. “It’s nothing you have to think about. But I have nowhere to go. Not for the last few nights. I was put out.”

Leventhal studied him silently. Then he moved aside and said, “All right. Come on.” He let Allbee precede him into the front room and pointed to a chair. He himself went to the window and put his head out, getting a glimpse of the reddened and darkened heavy forms of the street as he drew a long breath. He sat down on the creaking bed. It had not been made for a week, and papers and cardboard crescents the laundry put inside his collars were scattered over it. In crossing his legs, Allbee gave a twitch to his stained, loose-hanging trousers. His manner in some things was persistently gentlemanly. He knit his fingers around his knee.

“Now let’s have it again. What happened, you were thrown out? Where were you, in a hotel, a room?”

“A furnished room. My landlord confiscated my stuff. Not that there was much of it.” Allbee’s smile crept for a moment into the corners of his mouth and then was gone. “But such as there was.”

“For back rent?”

“Yes.”

“Was it much?”

“I have no idea what I owed him. Or them. There’s a landlady, too. In fact she’s the whole works. The Punts. They’re a couple of Germans. She’s a fat old woman with snag teeth. The nephew’s a longshoreman. He’s not so bad. It’s that smelly old woman’s fault. She kept after him. Old people, especially old women, are the hardest customers. They’ve made it, so to hell with everybody.”

“Made what? What are you talking about?”

“Lived so long. Pulled through. A long life,” said Allbee. “All the hardships. The rich are rough on the poor for the same reason. The veteran is rough on the tenderfoot. All the way down the line. You know that yourself. .”

“How much do you owe them? Ten dollars, twenty…?” said Leventhal stopping him impatiently.

“More like forty or fifty. To be honest with you, I can’t even make an estimate. I gave them a little on account, now and then. I don’t know. Less than they say, you can be sure ol that.”

“Didn’t they say?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Don’t tell me!”

Allbee did not speak.

“Don’t you want to go back there, pay them a little? If it’s forty dollars, I haven’t got that kind of money on hand, but if you give them something..?”

“No, thanks, the whole house smells. Pardon me, but that old Mrs Punt — I can’t stand uncleanliness like that.”

“I’ll bet you’re a model roomer, too.”

“I’m not the worst.”

“Excuse me, but I forgot you were an aristocrat,” Leventhal muttered with a short laugh, Allbee looked at him simply, without a touch of reproof.

“Well, where have you been staying?”

“Fortunately the weather’s been nice. I slept out. In the open. I could have gone to a shelter or a mission. I thought if the weather turned bad that I would. I’d go religious for a while. But it’s been beautiful.”

“I don’t know how you could let things get that bad. If you’re telling me the truth.”

“If I told you the whole truth, it wouldn’t sound plausible, so I’m only telling you part of it. I’m cutting it short. I suppose I shouldn’t have let things get out of hand like this. Last week I kept warning myself to hurry up and do something, but I didn’t pull myself together for some reason, and then Punt threw me out and there I was.” He turned his hand inward in a gesture of self-presentation. “The way I look, pearl diving is about the only work I could get.”

“How much money did your wife leave you?” Leventhal asked suddenly.

Allbee colored. “What business is it of yours?” he said.

“Why, man, you should have done something with it instead of just living it up.”

“You can’t bring the world to its knees with a little insurance money. .” He hesitated and added, “I don’t owe you any explanation, do I?”

“You don’t owe me anything. I don’t owe you anything, either.”

Allbee did not accept this, but he confined his disagreement to a shrug. Then he examined Leventhal at length. “I had my reasons for doing what I did,” he said. “I was in a peculiar state of mind and I wanted to get off the merry-go-round. Your wife is away, now. What if she were killed in an accident? Then you’d have the right to ask me such a question.”

“You’re an idiot!” said Leventhal.

“I’m only saying that we’re not in the same boat. Wait till we’re in the same boat.”

“God forbid!”

“Of course. Who wants to see harm come to anyone? But accidents happen. You ought to realize that.”

“Look,” said Leventhal, “it’s as I say. I don’t owe you anything. But I’ll give you a few bucks. Go to your rooming house or to a hotel.”

“I can’t go back. It’s impossible. I can’t ring Punt’s bell at this time of the night. Besides, they have somebody else in the room. That’s why they threw me out. And what sort of hotel would take me in? Like this? Without a bag? Unless you’re suggesting a flophouse?”

“Well,” said Leventhal. “Why beat around the bush? I see you’ve got your heart set on sleeping here tonight. I could see that all along.”