Saul Bellow - The Victim

“Down a way.”

They came to a corner. “No use going on with you,” said Allbee. “I had my coffee before getting on the subway.”

“Good-by,” Leventhal said indifferently, hardly pausing; he glanced at the traffic light. Allbee hung on, a little to the rear.

“I wanted to ask you — will you lend me a few dollars? Five or so…?”

“To start life over?” said Leventhal, still looking away.

“You offered me some, awhile back.”

“Tell me why I should give you anything.” Leventhal turned squarely to him.

Allbee met this with an uncertain, puzzled smile while Leventhal, on the other hand, felt more steadily balanced and confident.

“You tell me,” he said again.

“You offered it. You’ll get it back.” Allbee dropped his glance, and there was a curious flicker not only in his lowered lids, over the fullness of his eyeballs, but over his temples.

“Yes, naturally I will,” Leventhal said. “You’re a man of honor.”

“I want to borrow ten bucks or so.”

“You raised it. You said five, before, and five is what I’ll let you have. But I’ll give you notice now that if you show up drunk. .”

“Don’t worry about that.”

“Worry? It’s not my lookout.”

“I’m not a drunkard. Not a real one.”

Leventhal had half a mind to ask what he was, really, what he genuinely thought he was. But he said instead, with casual irony, “And here I believed you when you said you were so reckless.” He opened his wallet and took out five singles.

“I appreciate it,” said Allbee, folding the money and buttoning it up in his shirt pocket. “You’ll get every penny back.”

“Okay,” Leventhal replied dryly.

Allbee turned away, and Leventhal thought, “If he takes one shot — and he probably thinks he’ll have one and quit — he’ll take two and then a dozen. That’s the way they are.”

There was a letter from Mary waiting for him that evening. He pulled it out of the mailbox thankfully. Allbee’s hints had bothered him more than he knew. He had brushed them aside. What reason did he have to be anxious about her? Nevertheless there were coincidences; things were mentioned and then they occurred. He worked his finger under the flap and tore open the envelope. The letter was thick. He sat down on the stairs and read it in absorption and deep pleasure. It was dated Tuesday night; she had just come back from dinner at her uncle’s. She asked for news of Mickey — Leventhal had put off writing about him — and she complained mildly about her mother. It was comical and strange that her mother treated her like a child. She didn’t make coffee enough for two in the morning, assuming that her daughter still drank milk, unable to grasp the fact that she was not merely a grown woman but a woman no longer so young. This morning a few gray hairs had showed up. Old! Leventhal smiled, but his smile was touched with solicitude. He turned the page. She had so much time on her hands and so little to do that she had bought yardgoods and was sewing herself some slips, trimming them with lace from old blouses of her mother”s, “still in good condition and very pretty as you’ll see when I get home.” The rest of the letter was about her brother’s children. He put it to his mouth as though to cover a cough and touched the paper with his lips.

If she were still in Baltimore, he would have gone down for the holiday. But unless he flew, he could not get back from Charleston by Tuesday. And besides there was her mother in Charleston, recently widowed and no doubt difficult. He would wait and have Mary to himself in a few weeks, when things were quieter. She would make them quieter. He had great faith in her ability to restore normalcy.

The thought of reunion made entering the house all the harder. He listened at the door before going in. He wanted to avoid being taken by surprise again. There were no sounds. “Let him just come back drunk,” Leventhal said to himself. “That’s all I ask.”

Within a few days the flat had become dirty. The sink was full of dishes and garbage, newspapers were scattered over the front-room floor, the ash trays were spilling over, and the air stank. Depressed, Leventhal opened the windows. Where was Wilma? Didn’t she generally come on Wednesdays? Perhaps Mary had forgotten to ask her to continue in her absence. He decided to ask Mrs Nunez tomorrow to clean the place. Picking up an ash tray, he took it to the toilet to empty. The tiles were slippery. He grasped the shower curtains for support; they were wet. In the dark his foot encountered something sodden and, setting the ash tray in the sink, he bent to the floor and picked up his cotton bathrobe. He took a quick, angry step into the front room and spread the dripping robe to the light. There were shoeprints on it and, around the pocket, pale blue stains that looked like inkstains. He emptied it and found several ads torn from the paper, Jack Shifcart’s business card, the one jokingly intended for Schlossberg, and, bent and smeared, the two postcards he had received from Mary a few weeks ago. He hurled the robe furiously into the tub. His face was drawn, his mouth gaping with rage. “The… sucking bitch!” he brought out, almost inarticulate and struggling ferociously against a stifling pressure in his throat. He flung aside the chair before his desk, threw the writing leaf down, tore papers out of the pigeonholes and drawers, and began to go through them — as if, in his numbness and blindness, he could tell what was missing. Awkwardly, his hands stiff, he spread them out: letters, bills, certificates, bundles of canceled checks, old bankbooks, recipes that Mary had pasted on cards and put away. Heaping them together again he picked up the blotter, banged up the leaf with his knee, and pushed them, blotter and all, into a drawer. He locked it, put the key in his watch pocket, and sat down on the bed. He still retained the cards and the clippings he had taken from the pocket of the robe. “I’ll kill him!” he cried, bringing his fist down heavily on the mattress between his knees; and then he was silent and his large eyes stared as though he were trying to force open an inward blindness with the sharp edge of something actual. He rubbed his fingers thickly on his forehead. Presently he began to read Mary’s cards, the words of intimacy meant only for him. There were a few private references and abbreviations that no one else could understand; the drift of the rest was hard to miss. “To carry them around like that, to keep them to look at!” he thought. He felt a drench of shame like a hot liquid over his neck and shoulders. “If that isn’t nasty, twisted, bitching dirty!” It sickened him. If Allbee had seen them accidentally… that too would have been hateful to him. But it was not accidental; Allbee had gone into his things, his desk — Shifcart’s card proved that, for Leventhal was certain he had put it away — and snooped over his correspondence and kept these cards to amuse himself with. And perhaps he had seen Mary’s earliest letters, the letters of reconciliation after the engagement was broken. They were in the desk, somewhere. Was that the reason he had made those remarks today about marriage and the rest? He might have made them without knowing, on the chance that he was susceptible. Nearly everyone was. Leventhal thought with a stab of that incident before his marriage and Mary’s behavior, which he still did not understand. How could she have done that? But he had long ago decided to accept the fact and stop puzzling about the cause. To Allbee, who might have read the letters, it must have seemed a wonderful opportunity: Mary away, and so why not drop a hint? What he did not know was that Leventhal’s old rival was dead. He had died of heart-failure two years ago. Mary’s brother had brought the news on his last visit North. It wasn’t to be found in a letter.