Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

How could that happen? She studied what she had written (and finally acknowledged there was no alternative). “I’m drunk,” she said, “and don’t know what I’m doing. I’ll die, and end. Like India. Dead as that lilac bush.”

Then she thought that there was a beginning, and a middle. She shrank from the last term. She began once more—a beginning. After that, there was the early middle, then middle middle, late middle middle, quite late middle. In fact the middle is all I know. The rest is just a rumor.

Only tonight I can’t give the house away. I’m drunk and so I need it. And tomorrow, she promised herself, I’ll think again. I’ll work it out, for sure.

DIZZY WITH PERPLEXITIES, seduced by a restless spirit, Katrina Goliger took a trip she shouldn’t have taken. What was the matter with her, why was she jumping around like this? A divorced suburban matron with two young kids, was she losing ground, were her looks going or her options shrinking so fast that it made her reckless? Looks were not her problem; she was pretty enough, dark hair, nice eyes. She had a full figure, a little on the plump side, but she handled it with some skill. Victor Wulpy, the man in her life, liked her just as she was. The worst you could say of her was that she was clumsy. Clumsiness, however, might come out as girlishness if it was well managed. But there were few things which Trina managed well. The truth, to make a summary of it, was that she was passably pretty, she was awkward, and she was wildly restless.

In all fairness, her options were increasingly limited by Wulpy. It wasn’t that he was being capricious. He had very special difficulties to deal with—the state of his health, certain physical disabilities, his advanced age, and, in addition to the rest, his prominence. He was a major figure, a world-class intellectual, big in the art world, and he had been a bohemian long before bohemianism was absorbed into everyday life. The civilized world knew very well who Victor Wulpy was. You couldn’t discuss modern painting, poetry—any number of important topics—without referring to him.

Well, then, toward midnight, and in the dead of winter—Evanston, Illinois, where she lives at the bottom of a continental deep freeze—Katrina’s phone rings and Victor asks her—in effect he tells her—“I have to have you here first thing in the morning.”

“Here” is Buffalo, New York, where Victor has been lecturing.

And Katrina, setting aside all considerations of common sense or of self-respect, says, “I’ll get an early flight out.”

If she had been having an affair with a younger man, Katrina might have passed it off with a laugh, saying, “That’s a real brainstorm. It would be a gas, wouldn’t it, and just what this zero weather calls for. But what am I supposed to do with my kids on such short notice?” She might also have mentioned that her divorced husband was suing for custody of the little girls, and that she had a date downtown tomorrow with the court-appointed psychiatrist who was reporting on her fitness. She would have mixed these excuses with banter, and combined them with a come-on: “Let’s do it Thursday. I’ll make it up to you.” With Victor refusal was not one of her options. It was almost impossible, nowadays, to say no to him. Poor health was a euphemism. He had nearly died last year.

Various forces—and she wasn’t altogether sorry—robbed her of the strength to resist. Victor was such a monument, and he went back so far in modern cultural history. You had to remember that he had begun to publish in transition, an avant-garde magazine, and always in lowercase, and Hound and Horn before she was born. He was beginning to have an avant-garde reputation while she was still in her playpen. And if you thought he was not tired out and had no more surprises up his sleeve, you were thinking of the usual threescore and ten, not of Victor Wulpy. Even his bitterest detractors, the diehard grudgers, had to admit that he was still first-rate. And about how many Americans had leaders of thought like Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Hannah Arendt said, “ Chapeau bas! This is a man of genius.” Merleau-Ponty was especially impressed with Victor’s essays on Karl Marx.

Besides, Victor was personally so impressive—he had such a face, such stature; without putting it on, he was so commanding that he often struck people as being a king, of an odd kind. A New York-style king, thoroughly American—good-natured, approachable, but making it plain that he was a sovereign; he took no crap from anybody. But last year—it was that time of life for him, the midseventies—he went down with a crash. It happened at Harvard, and he was taken to Mass. General for surgery. The doctors there had dragged him from the edge of the grave. Or maybe he had spurned the grave himself, wrapped in bandages as he was and with pipes up his nose and drugged to the limit. Seeing him on his back, you would never have believed that he would walk through the door again. But he did just that.

Suppose, however, that Victor had died, what would Katrina have done? To think of it confused her. But Katrina’s sister, Dorothea, who never spared anybody, spelled out the consequences of Victor’s death. Dorothea, in plain truth, couldn’t let the subject alone. “This has been the main event of your life. This time, kid, you really came out swinging.” (An odd figure for Katrina, who was pretty and plump and seldom so much as raised her voice.) “You’re going to be up against it when it finally happens. You must have known you could only have a short run.” Katrina knew all that Dotey had to say. The resume ran as follows: You dumped your husband to have this unusual affair. Sexual excitement and social ambition went together. You aimed to break into high cultural circles. I don’t know what you thought you had to offer. If you took Daddy’s word for it, and he’d repeat it from the next world, you’re just an average Dumb Dora from north-suburban Chicagoland.

Quite true, the late Billy Weigal had called his daughters Dumb Dora One and Dumb Dora Two. He sent them down to the state university at Champaign-Urbana, where they joined a sorority and studied Romance languages. The girls wanted French? Good. Theater arts? Sure, why not. Old Doc Weigal pretended to think that it was all jibber-jabber. He had been a politician, mainly a tax fixer with high connections in the Chicago Democratic machine. His wife, too, was a mental lightweight. It was part of the convention that the womenfolk be birdbrains. It pleased his corrupt, protective heart. As Victor pointed out (all higher interpretation came from him), this was plain old middle-class ideology, the erotic components of which were easy to make out. Ignorance in women, a strong stimulus for men who considered themselves rough. On an infinitely higher level, Baudelaire had advised staying away from learned ladies. Bluestockings and bourgeois ladies caused sexual paralysis. Artists could trust only women of the people.

Anyway, Katrina had been raised to consider herself a nitwit. That she knew she was not one was an important secret postulate of her feminine science. And she didn’t really object to Dorothea’s way of discussing her intricate and fascinating problem with Victor. Dorothea said, “I want to get you to look at it from every angle.” What this really meant was that Dotey would try to shaft her from every side. “Let’s start with the fact that as Mrs. Alfred Goliger nobody in Chicago would take notice of you. When Mr. Goliger invited people to look at his wonderful collections of ivory, jade, semiprecious stones, and while he did all the talking, he only wanted you to serve the drinks and eats. And to the people with whom he tried to make time, the Lyric Opera types, the contemporary arts crowd, the academics, and those other shits, you were just a humdrum housewife. Then all of a sudden, through Wulpy, you’re meeting all the Mother-wells and Rauschenbergs and Ashberys and Frankenthalers, and you leave the local culture creeps groveling in the dust. However, when your old wizard dies, what then? Widows are forgotten pretty fast, except those with promotional talent. So what happens to girlfriends?”