Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

So Zet laid aside his logic books. They had lost their usefulness. They joined the funny papers he had put away when he was eight years old. He had no more use for Rudolf Carnap than for Boob McNutt. He said to Lottie, “What other books are there?” She went to the shelf and read off the titles. He stopped her at Moby Dick, and she handed him the large volume. After reading a few pages he knew that he would never be a Ph. D. in philosophy. The sea came into his inland, Lake Michigan soul, he told me. Oceanic cold was just the thing for his fever. He felt polluted, but he read about purity. He had reached a bad stage of limited selfhood, disaffection, unwillingness to be; he was sick; he wanted out. Then he read this dazzling book. It rushed over him. He thought he would drown. But he didn’t drown; he floated.

The creature of flesh and blood, and ill, went to the toilet. Because of his intestines he shuffled to sit on the board and over the porcelain, over the sewer-connected hole and its water—the necessary disgrace. And when the dizzy floor tiles wavered under his sick eyes like chicken wire, the amethyst of the ocean was also there in the bevels of the medicine-chest mirror, and the white power of the whale, to which the bathtub gave a fleeting gauge. The cloaca was there, the nausea, and also the coziness of bowel smells going back to childhood, the old brown colors. And the dismay and sweetness of ragged coughing and the tropical swampiness of the fever. But also there rose up the seas. Straight through the air shaft, west, and turn left at the Hudson. The Atlantic was there.

The real business of his life was with comprehensive vision, he decided. He had been working in philosophy with the resemblance theory of universals. He had an original approach to the predicate “resemble.” But that was finished. When sick, he was decisive. He had the weak sweats and was coughing up blue phlegm with his fist to his mouth and his eyes swelling. He cleared his throat and said to Lottie, who sat on the bed holding his tea for him during this coughing fit, “I don’t think I can go on in the philosophy department.”

“It’s really worrying you, isn’t it? You were talking philosophy in your sleep the other night.”

“Was I?”

“Talking in your sleep about epistemology or something. I don’t understand that stuff, you know that.”

“Ah, well, it’s not really for me, either.”

“But, honey, you don’t have to do anything you don’t like. Switch to something else. I’ll back you all the way.”

“Ah, you’re a dear woman. But we’ll have to get along without the fellowship.” What’s it worth? Those cheap bastards don’t give you enough to live on anyway. Zet, dear, screw the money. I can see you’ve gone through a change of heart because ofthat book.”

‘Oh, Lottie, it’s a miracle, that book. It takes you out of this human world.”

“What do you mean?”

‘I mean it takes you out of the universe of mental projections or insulating fictions of ordinary social practice or psychological habit. It gives you elemental liberty. What really frees you from these insulating social and psychological fictions is the other fiction, of art. There really is no human life without this poetry. Ah, Lottie, I’ve been starving on symbolic logic.”

“I’ve got to read that book now,” she said.

But she didn’t get far with it. Sea books were for men, and anyway she wasn’t bookish; she was too impulsive to sit long with any book. That was Zet’s department. He would tell her all she needed to know about Moby Dick.

“I’ll have to go and talk to Professor Edman.”

“As soon as you’re strong enough, go on down and quit. Just quit. All the better. What the hell do you want to be a professor for? Oh, that dog!” Katusha had gotten into a barking duel with an animal in the next yard. “Shut up, you bitch! Sometimes I really hate that lousy dog. I feel her barking right in the middle of my head.”

“Give her to the Chinese laundryman; he likes her.”

“Likes her? He’d cook her. Now look, Zet, don’t you worry about a thing. Screw that logic. Okay? You can do a hundred things. You know French, Russian, German, and you’re a real brain. We don’t need much to live on. No fancy stuff for me. I shop on Union Square. So what?”

“With that beautiful Macedonian body,” said Zet, “Klein’s is just as good as haute couture. Blessings on your bust, your belly, and your bottom.”

“If your fever goes down by the weekend, we’ll go to the country, to Giddings and Gertrude.”

“Pa will be upset when he hears I’ve dropped out of Columbia.”

“So what? I know you love him, but he’s such a grudger, you can’t please him anyway. Well, screw him, too.”

They moved downtown in 1940 and lived on Bleecker Street for a dozen years. They were soon prominent in Greenwich Village. In Chicago they had been bohemians without knowing it. In the Village Zet was identified with the avant-garde in literature and with radical politics. When the Russians invaded Finland, radical politics became absurd. Marxists debated whether the workers’ state could be imperialistic. This was too nonsensical for Zetland. Then there was the Nazi-Soviet pact, there was the war. Constantine was born during the war—Lottie wanted him to have a Balkan name. Zetland wanted to enter the service. When he behaved with spirit, Lottie was always for him, and she supported him against his father, who of course disapproved.

THE NEIGHBORS—there were in all six white people who lived at Sego Desert Lake—told one another that old Hattie could no longer make it alone. The desert life, even with a forced-air furnace in the house and butane gas brought from town in a truck, was still too difficult for her. There were women even older than Hattie in the county. Twenty miles away was Amy Walters, the gold miner’s widow. She was a hardy old girl, more wiry and tough than Hattie. Every day of the year she took a bath in the icy lake. And Amy was crazy about money and knew how to manage it, as Hattie did not. Hattie was not exactly a drunkard, but she hit the bottle pretty hard, and now she was in trouble and there was a limit to the help she could expect from even the best of neighbors.

They were fond of her, though. You couldn’t help being fond of Hattie. She was big and cheerful, puffy, comic, boastful, with a big round back and stiff, rather long legs. Before the century began she had graduated from finishing school and studied the organ in Paris. But now she didn’t know a note from a skillet. She had tantrums when she played canasta. And all that remained of her fine fair hair was frizzled along her forehead in small gray curls. Her forehead was not much wrinkled, but the skin was bluish, the color of skim milk. She walked with long strides in spite of the heaviness of her hips. With her shoulders, she pushed on, round-backed, showing the flat rubber bottoms of her shoes.

Once a week, in the same cheerful, plugging but absent way, she took off her short skirt and the dirty aviator’s jacket with the wool collar and put on a girdle, a dress, and high-heeled shoes. When she stood on these heels her fat old body trembled. She wore a big brown Rembrandt-like tarn with a tencent-store brooch, eyelike, carefully centered. She drew a straight line with lipstick on her mouth, leaving part of the upper lip pale. At the wheel of her old turret-shaped car, she drove, seemingly methodical but speeding dangerously, across forty miles of mountainous desert to buy frozen meat pies and whiskey. She went to the Laundromat and the hairdresser, and then had lunch with two martinis at the Arlington. Afterward she would often visit Marian Nabot’s Silvermine Hotel at Miller Street near skid row and pass the rest of the day gossiping and drinking with her cronies, old divorcées like herself who had settled in the West. Hattie never gambled anymore and she didn’t care for the movies. And at five o’clock she drove back at the same speed, calmly, partly blinded by the smoke of her cigarette. The fixed cigarette gave her a watering eye.