Saul Bellow - The Victim

At home he took off his jacket in the vestibule. Through the window, in the clear depth over the wandering brown smoke and the low-lying red of twilight clouds, he saw the evening star. He went through the narrow kitchen into the dining-room, which was empty. Coming back to the front room, he was not immediately aware of Allbee’s presence. It was only after he had dropped into a chair beside the window that he discovered him sitting between the desk and the corner, and he cried out fiercely, “What’s the big idea!”

He shot up and turned on the desk lamp. His hands were shaking.

“I was enjoying the evening.”

“My foot, the evening,” Leventhal grumbled. “Drunken bastard!”

He was stubbornly silent, after this, determined that Allbee should speak first. The electric clock whirred swiftly. Allbee’s head lay on the back of the chair, his large legs were thrown wide apart, their weight supported on his heels. His hands, loose-wristed, were folded on his chest. After some time he moved a little and sighed, “This killing heat, it takes my energy away.”

“It couldn’t be something besides heat that takes it away, could it?”

“What-?”

“Whisky,” Leventhal said. “You’re supposed to be looking for work. What have you been doing? Sitting here, drinking? When you came I understood you were going to get something to do and find yourself a room.”

Allbee brought his head forward.

“I don’t want to rush into anything,” he said beginning to smile. “In any deal — you know that, you must know it by instinct — the worst thing of all is to hurry. Before you make up your mind… if you settle for buttons, peanuts… You have to think things over,” he ended with an unsteady, delighted, foolish look of self-congratulation. Was he drunk? Leventhal wondered.

“ You , a deal,” he said contemptuously. “What kind of a deal have you got?”

“Oh, I might have. I might have something.”

“Furthermore, how do you get in and out of here? I locked the door last night. I’m sure I locked it.”

“I hope you don’t mind. There were some keys in the kitchen and one of them fitted.”

Leventhal scowled. Had Mary forgotten her key? Or was this an extra? “Originally the agent gave us two,” he thought, “and the mailbox keys and the key to the locker in the basement. Or were there three house keys?”

“I wasn’t sure I was coming back,” said Allbee. “But as long as there was a possibility of it, I thought it would be more convenient to have a key. I tried to call you at your office yesterday, but you weren’t in.”

“Don’t start bothering me at the office,” Leventhal said excitedly. “What did you want?”

“I wanted to ask your permission about the key, for one thing. And then there was something else that occurred to me, that on an outside chance there was an opening for someone like me at Beard and Company, and I might apply. You’re in a position to help me there.”

“At Beard’s? — It didn’t just occur to you! I don’t believe it.”

“It did so,” Allbee quickly began, but stopped. His large full lips were parted and his loud breathing suggested repressed laughter; he looked at him with comic curiosity. But, seeing him stare back, he started over again, more seriously. “No, it did, it struck me all of a sudden as I was eating breakfast. ‘Why shouldn’t Leventhal help me get a job at his place?’ And it’s fair enough, isn’t it? I introduced you to Rudiger. We won’t count what happened. We’ll forget about it. Let’s think of it only as a return courtesy. You make an appointment with Mr Beard for me — does he do the hiring over there in person? — and we’ll be square.”

“They don’t need anybody.”

“Let me find that out for myself.”

“Anyway, they couldn’t give you the type of job you want.”

“But you don’t care what kind of job I want. It wouldn’t make any difference to you, what,” he said grinning. “Whether I became a dish washer or scavenger, or hired myself out as human bait.”

“No, it wouldn’t, that’s true,” Leventhal replied.

“Then why should you worry about the type of work they offer me at your place?”

“Didn’t I hear you talking about a deal?” said Leventhal. He went to the mantel, fumbled for a cigarette in a jar, and, sitting down, slid his hand across the window sill toward the packet of matches lying in the ash tray. Allbee watched him.

“You know, when I see how your mind works, I actually feel sorry for you,” he said finally.

Leventhal pulled deeply at the cigarette; it stuck to his lips and he plucked it away.

“Look, the answer is a straight no. Never mind the discussion. I have plenty of trouble as it is. Skip the discussions.” His self-possession was temporary, like a reflection in water that may be wiped out at the first swell.

“I understand. You’re afraid I’ll turn around and do to you what you did to me at Dill’s. You think I want to go there and retaliate by getting you fired. But your introduction isn’t necessary. I can make trouble for you without it.”

“Go ahead.”

“You know I can.”

“Well, do!” he began to be shaken by the swells. “You think the job is so valuable to me? I can live without it. So do your worst. Hell with it all!”

“I took Williston’s word about you. He said you were all right, so I made the appointment for you with Rudiger. See? I wasn’t suspicious. It’s not in my make-up, I’m happy to say. I didn’t even know who you were, except from seeing you a few times at his parties.”

“I feel too low to horse around with you, Allbee. I’m willing to help you out. I told you so already. But as far as having you in the same office where I could see you every day — no! As it is, there are plenty of people over there I don’t care to see every day. You’d fit in with them better than I do. I don’t have any choice about them. But I do about you. So it’s out of the question. No! — and finished. I couldn’t stand it.”

Allbee seemed to be considering something in Leventhal’s words that pleased him, for his smile deepened.

“Yes,” he admitted. “You don’t have to have me around. And you’re right. I think you really are right. You have a choice. I envy you, Leventhal. Because when it came to the important things in my life, I never had the chance to choose. I didn’t want my wife to die. And if I could have chosen, she wouldn’t have left me. I didn’t choose to be stabbed in the back at Dill’s either.”

“Who! I stabbed you in the back?” Leventhal furiously said, making a fist.

“I didn’t choose to be fired by Rudiger, do you like that better? Anyway, you’re in an independent position and I’m not.” He was already falling into that tone of speculative earnestness that Leventhal detested. “Now I believe that luck… there really is such a thing as luck and those who do and don’t have it. In the long run, I don’t know who’s better off. It must make things very unreal to have luck all the time. But it’s a blessing, in some things, and especially if it gives you the chance to make a choice. That doesn’t come very often, does it? For most people? No, it doesn’t. It’s hard to accept that, but we have to accept it. We don’t choose much. We don’t choose to be born, for example, and unless we commit suicide we don’t choose the time to die, either. But having a few choices in between makes you seem less of an accident to yourself. It makes you feel your life is necessary. The world’s a crowded place, damned if it isn’t. It’s an overcrowded place. There’s room enough for the dead. Even they get buried in layers, I hear. There’s room enough for them because they don’t want anything. But the living… Do you want anything? Is there anything you want? There are a hundred million others who want that very same damn thing. I don’t care whether it’s a sandwich or a seat in the subway or what. I don’t know exactly how you feel about it, but I’ll say, speaking for myself, it’s hard to believe that my life is necessary. I guess you wouldn’t be familiar with the Catholic catechism where it asks, ‘For whom was the world made?’ Something along that line. And the answer is, ‘For man.’ For every man? Yes, for every last mother’s son. Every man. Precious to God, if you please, and made for His greater glory and given the whole blessed earth. Like Adam. He called the beasts by their names and they obeyed him. I wish I could do that. Now that’s clever. For everybody who repeats ‘For man’ it means ‘For me.’ ‘The world was created for me, and I am absolutely required, not only now, but forever. And it’s all for me, forever.’ Does that make sense?”