Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

Imitating their brother, the aunts, too, gave false kisses with inexperienced lips. Lottie then cried with joy. They were leaving Chicago, the most boring place in the world, and getting rid of surly Ozymandias and of her mother the witch and her poor daddy the knife grinder. She was married to Zet, who had a million times more charm and warmth and brains than anyone else.

‘Oh, Pa! Goodbye!” Zet emotionally took his iron father in his arms.

‘Do right. Study. Make something of yourself. If you get in trouble, wire for money.”

“Dear Pa, I love you. Masha, Dounia, I love you, too,” said Lottie, now red-faced with tears. She gave them all sobbing kisses. Then at the coach window, waving, the young people embraced and the train slid off.

As the Pacemaker departed, Father Zetland shook his fist at the observation car. He stamped his feet. At Lottie, who was ruining his son, he cried, “You wait! I’ll get you. Five years, ten years, but I’ll get you.” He shouted, “You bitch—you nasty cunt.”

Russian in his rage, he cried out, “СУКА!” His sisters did not understand.

Zet and Lottie swam into New York City from the skies—that was how it felt in the Pacemaker, rushing along the Hudson at sunrise. First many blue twigs overhanging the water, then a rosy color, and then the heavy flashing of the river under the morning sun. They were in the dining car, their eyes weary with an overflow of impressions. They were drained by a night of broken sleep in the day coach, and they were dazzled. They drank coffee from cups as grainy as soapstone, and poured from New York Central pewter. They were in the East, where everything was better, where objects were different. Here there was deeper meaning in the air.

After changing at Harmon to an electric locomotive, they began a more quick and eager ride. Trees, water, sky, and the sky raced off, floating, and there came bridges, structures, and at last the tunnel, where the air brakes gasped and the streamliner was checked. There were yellow bulbs in wire mesh, and subterranean air came through the vents. The doors opened, the passengers, pulling their clothing straight, flowed out and got their luggage, and Zet and Lottie, reaching Forty-second Street, refugees from arid and inhibited Chicago, from Emptyland, embraced at the curb and kissed each other repeatedly on the mouth. They had come to the World City, where all behavior was deeper and more resonant, where they could freely be themselves, as demonstrative as they liked. Intellect, art, the transcendent, needed no excuses here. Any cabdriver understood, Zet believed.

“Ah, darling, darling—thank God,” said Zet. “A place where it’s normal to be a human being.”

“Oh, Zet, amen!” said Lottie with tremors and tears.

At first they lived uptown, on the West Side. The small, chinging trolleys still rolled on slant Broadway. Lottie chose a room described as a studio, at the rear of a brownstone. There was a studio bedroom, and the bathroom was also the kitchen. Covered with a heavy, smooth board, the tub became the kitchen table. You could reach the gas ring from the bath. Zet liked that. Frying your eggs while you sat in the water. You could hear the largo of the drain as you drank your coffee, or watch the cockroaches come and go about the cupboards. The toaster spring was tight. It snapped out the bread. Sometimes a toasted cockroach was flung out. The ceilings were high. There was little daylight. The fireplace was made of small tiles. You could bring home an apple crate from Broadway and have a ten-minute fire, which left a little ash and many hooked nails. The studio turned into a Zet habitat, a Zet-and-Lottie place: dark, dirty portieres, thriftshop carpets, upholstered chairs with bald arms that shone, said Zetland, like gorilla hide. The window opened on an air shaft, but Zet had lived even in Chicago behind drawn shades or in a whitewashed coalbin. Lottie bought lamps with pink porcelain shades flounced at the edges like ancient butter dishes. The room had the agreeable dimness of a chapel, the gloom of a sanctuary. When I visited Byzantine churches in Yugoslavia, I thought I had found the master model, the archetypal Zet habitat.

The Zetlands settled in. Crusts, butts, coffee grounds, dishes of dog food, books, journals, music stands, odors of Macedonian cookery (mutton, yogurt, lemon, rice), and white Chilean wine in bulbous bottles. Zetland reconnoitered the philosophy department, brought home loads of books from the library, and put himself to work. His industry might have pleased Ozymandias. But nothing, he would say, could really please the old guy. Or perhaps his ultimate pleasure was never to be pleased, and never to approve. With an M. A. of her own in sociology, Lottie went to work in an office. Look at her, said Zet, such an impulsive young woman, and so efficient, such a crack executive secretary. See how steady she was, how uncomplaining about getting up in the dark, and what a dependable employee this Balkan Gypsy had turned out to be. He found a sort of sadness in this, and he was astonished. Office work would have killed him. He had tried that. Ozymandias had found jobs for him. But routine and paperwork paralyzed him. He had worked in the company warehouse helping the zoologist to see what ailed the filberts and the figs and the raisins, keeping parasites in check. That was interesting, but not for long. And one week he had worked in the shops of the Field Museum, learning to make plastic leaves for habitats. Dead animals, he learned, were preserved in many poisons and that, he said, was how he felt about being an employee—a toxic condition.

So it was Lottie who worked, and the afternoons were very long. Zet and the dog waited for her at five o’clock. At last she came, with groceries, hurrying westward from Broadway. In the street Zet and Miss Katusha ran toward her. Zet called out, “Lottie!” and the brown dog scrabbled on the pavement and whined. Lottie was wan from the subway, and warm, and made contralto sounds in her throat when she was kissed. She brought home hamburger meat and yogurt, bones for Katusha, and small gifts for Zetland. They were still honeymooners. They were ecstatic in New York. They had the animal ecstasies of the dog for emphasis or analogy. They made friends in the building with a pulp writer and his wife—Giddings and Gertrude. Giddings wrote Westerns: the Balzac of the Badlands, Zet named him. Giddings called him the Wittgenstein of the West Side. Zetland thus had an audience for his cheerful inventions. He read aloud funny sentences from the Encyclopedia of Unified Sciences and put H. Rider Haggard, Gidding’s favorite novelist, into the language of symbolic logic. Evenings, Lottie became again a Macedonian Gypsy, her mama’s daughter. Mama was a necromancer from Skoplje, said Zetland, and made spells with cats’ urine and snakes’ navels. She knew the erotic secrets of antiquity. Evidently Lottie knew them, too. It was established that Lottie’s female qualities were rich, and deep and sweet. Romantic Zetland said fervent and grateful things about them.

From so much sweetness, this chocolate life, nerves glowing too hotly, came pangs of anxiety. In its own way the anxiety was also delicious, he said. He explained that he had two kinds of ecstasy, sensuous and sick. Those early months in New York were too much for him. His lung trouble came back, and he ran a fever; he ached, passed urine painfully, and he lay in bed, the faded wine-colored pajamas binding him at the crotch and under the plump arms. His skin developed its old irritability.

It was his invalid childhood all over again for a few weeks. It was awful that he should fall into it, a grown man, just married, but it was delectable, too. He remembered the hospital very well, the booming in his head when he was etherized and the horrible open wound in his belly. It was infected and wouldn’t heal. He drained through a rubber tube which an ordinary diaper pin secured. He understood that he was going to die, but he read the funny papers. All the kids in the ward had to read were funny papers and the Bible: Slim Jim, Boob McNutt, Noah’s ark, Hagar, Ishmael ran into each other like the many colors of the funnies. It was a harsh Chicago winter, there were golden icon rays at the frosted windows in the morning, and the streetcars droned and ground, clanged. Somehow he had made it out of the hospital, and his aunts nursed him at home with marrow broth and scalded milk and melted butter, soda biscuits as big as playing cards. His illness in New York brought back the open wound with its rotten smell and the rubber tube which a diaper pin kept from falling into his belly, and bedsores and his having to learn again at the age of eight how to walk. A very early and truthful sense of the seizure of matter by life energies, the painful, difficult, intricate chemical-electrical transformation and organization, gorgeous, streaming with radiant colors, and all the scent and the stinking. This combination was too harsh. It whirled too much. It troubled and intimidated the soul too much. What were we here for, of all strange beings and creatures the strangest? Clear colloid eyes to see with, for a while, and see so finely, and a palpitating universe to see, and so many human messages to give and to receive. And the bony box for thinking and for the storage of thoughts, and a cloudy heart for feelings. Ephemerids, grinding up other creatures, flavoring and heating their flesh, devouring this flesh. A kind of being filled with death-knowledge, and also filled with infinite longings. These peculiar internal phrases were not intentional. That was just it, they simply came to Zetland, naturally, involuntarily, as he was consulting with himself about this tangle of bright and terrifying qualities.