Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

What was necessary now was to speak as usual, so that when he said, “I had the travel desk make a reservation for you, if you want to use it—are you there?” she answered, “Let me find a pen that writes.” A perfectly good pen hung on a string. What she needed was to collect herself while she thought of an alternative. She wasn’t clever enough to come up with anything, so she began to print out the numbers he gave her. Heavyhearted? Of course she was. She was forced to consider her position from a “worst case” point of view. A North Shore mother of two, in a bad, a deteriorating marriage, had begun to be available sexually to visitors. Selectively. It was true that a couple of wild mistakes had occurred. But then a godsend, Victor, turned up.

In long discussions with her analyst (whom she no longer needed), she had learned how central her father was in all this, in the formation or deformation of her character. Until she was ten years old she had known nothing but kindness from her daddy. Then, with the first hints of puberty, her troubles began. Exasperated with her, he said she was putting on a guinea-pig look. He called her a con artist. She was doing the farmer’s-daughter-traveling-salesman bit. “That puzzled expression, as if you can’t remember whether a dozen is eleven or thirteen. And what do you suppose happens with the thirteenth egg, hey? Pretty soon you’ll let a stranger lead you into the broom closet and take off your panties.” Well! Thank you, Daddy, for all the suggestions you planted in a child’s mind. Predictably she began to be sly and steal pleasure, and she did play the farmer’s daughter, adapting and modifying until she became the mature Katrina. In the end (a blessed miracle) it worked out for the best, for the result was just what had attracted Victor—an avant-garde personality who happened to be crazy about just this erotic mixture. Petty bourgeois sexuality, and retrograde petty bourgeois at that, happened to turn Victor on. So here was this suburban broad, the cliché of her father’s loaded forebodings: call her what you liked—voluptuary, luxurious beauty, confused sexpot, carnal idiot with piano legs, her looks (mouth half open or half shut) meaning everything or nothing. Just this grace-in-clumsiness was the aphrodisiac of one of the intellectual captains of the modern world. She dismissed the suggestion (Dotey’s suggestion) that it was his decline that had brought her into his life, that she appeared when he was old, failing, in a state of desperation or erotic bondage. And it was true that any day now the earth would open underfoot and he’d be gone.

Meanwhile, if he wasn’t so powerful as he once had been (as if some dust had settled on his surface), he was powerful still. His color was fresh and his hair vigorous. Now and then for an instant he might look pinched, but when he sat with a drink in his hand, talking away, his voice was so strong and his opinions so confident that it was inconceivable that he should ever disappear. The way she sometimes put it to herself was he was more than her lover. He was also retraining her. She had been admitted to his master class. Nobody else was getting such instruction.

“I’ve got all the numbers now.”

“You’ll have to catch the eight o’clock flight.”

“I’ll park at the Orrington, because while I’m gone for the day I don’t want the car sitting in front of the house.”

“Okay. And you’ll find me in the VIP lounge. There should be time for a drink before we catch the one P. M. flight.”

“Just as long as I’m back by midafternoon. And I can bring the notes you dictated.”

“Well,” said Victor, “I could have told you they were indispensable.” i see.

“I ask you to meet me, and it sounds like an Oriental proposition, as if the Sultan were telling his concubine to come out beyond the city walls with the elephants and the musicians….”

“How nice that you should mention elephants,” said Katrina, alert at once.

“Whereas it’s just Chicago-Buffalo-Chicago.”

That he should refer by a single word to her elephant puzzle, her poor attempt to do something on an elephant theme, was an unusual concession. She had stopped mentioning it because it made Victor go crosseyed with good-humored boredom. But now he had dropped a hint that ordering her to fly to Buffalo was just as tedious, just as bad art, as her floundering attempt to be creative with an elephant.

Katrina pushed this no further. She said, “I wish I could attend your talk tomorrow. I’d love to hear what you’ll say to those executives.”

“Completely unnecessary,” Victor said. “You hear better things from me in bed than I’ll ever say to those guys.”

He did say remarkable things during their hours of high intimacy. God only knows how much intelligence he credited her with. But he was a talker, he had to talk, and during those wide-ranging bed conversations (monologues) when he let himself go, he didn’t stop to explain himself; it was blind trust, it was faute de mieux, that made him confide in her. As he went on, he was more salty, scandalous, he was murderous. Reputations were destroyed when he got going, and people torn to bits. So-and-so was a plagiarist who didn’t know what to steal; X who was a philosopher was a chorus boy at heart; Y had a mind like a lazy Susan—six spoiled appetizers and no main course. Abed, Victor and Katrina smoked, drank, touched each other (tenderness from complicity), laughed; they thought —my God, they thought! Victor carried her into utterly foreign spheres of speculation. He lived for ideas. And he didn’t count on Katrina’s comprehension; he couldn’t. Incomprehension darkened his life sadly. But it was a fixed condition, a given. And when he was wicked she understood him well enough. He wasn’t wasting his wit on her, as when he said about Fonstine, a rival who tried to do him in, “He runs a Procrustean flophouse for bum ideas”; Katrina made notes later, and prayed that she was being accurate. So as usual Victor had it right—she did hear better things in bed than he could possibly say in public. When he took an entire afternoon off for such recreation, he gave himself over to it entirely—he was a daylong deep loller. When on the other hand he sat down to his papers, he was a daylong worker, and she didn’t exist for him. Nobody did.

Arrangements for tomorrow having been made, he was ready to hang up. “You’ll have to phone around to clear the decks,” he said. “The TV shows nasty weather around Chicago.”

“Yes, Krieggstein drove into a snowdrift.”

“Didn’t you say you were having him to dinner? Is he still there? Let him make himself useful.”

“Like what?”

“Like walking the dog. There’s a chore he can spare you.”

“Oh, he’ll volunteer to do that. Well, good night, then. And we’ll have a wingding when you get here.”

Hanging up, she wondered whether she hadn’t said “wingding” too loudly (Krieggstein) and also whether Victor might not be put off by such dated words, sorority sex slang going back to the sixties. Hints from the past wouldn’t faze him—what did he care about her college sex life? But he was unnervingly fastidious about language. As others were turned off by grossness, he was sensitive to bad style. She got into trouble in San Francisco when she insisted that he see M*A*S*H . “I’ve been to it, Vic. You mustn’t miss this picture.” Afterward, he could hardly bear to talk to her, an unforgettable disgrace. Eventually she made it up with him, after long days of coolness. Her conclusion was, “I can’t afford to be like the rest.”

Now back to Krieggstein: how different a corner within the human edifice Krieggstein occupied. “So you have to go out of town,” he said. At the fireside, somber and solid, he was giving his fullest attention to her problem. She often suspected that he might be an out-and-out kook. If he was a kook, how had he become her great friend? Well, there was a position to fill and nobody else to fill it with. And he was, remember, a true war hero. It was no easy matter to figure out who or what Sammy Krieggstein really was. Short, broad, bald, rugged, he apparently belonged to the police force. Sometimes he said he was on the vice squad, and sometimes homicide or narcotics; and now and then he wouldn’t say at all, as if his work were top-secret, superclassified. “This much I’ll tell you, dear—there are times on the street when I could use the good old flamethrower.” He had boxed in the Golden Gloves tournament, way back before the Pacific war, and had scar tissue on his face to prove it. Still earlier he had been a street fighter. He made himself out to be very tough—a terrifying person who was also a gentleman and a tender friend. The first time she invited him for a drink he asked for a cup of tea, but he laid out all his guns on the tea table. Under his arm he carried a Magnum, in his belt was stuck a flat small gun, and he had another pistol strapped to his leg. He had entertained the little girls with these weapons. Perfectly safe, he said. “Why should we give the whole weapon monopoly to the wild element on the streets?” He told Katrina when he took her to Le Perroquet about stabbings and disembowelments, car chases and shoot-outs. When a bruiser in a bar recently took him for a poor schnook, he showed him one of the guns and said, “All right, pal, how would you like a second asshole right between your eyes.” Drawing a theoretical conclusion from this anecdote, Krieggstein said to Katrina, “You people”—his interpretations were directed mainly at Victor—“ought to have a better idea than you do of how savage it is out there. When Mr. Wulpy wrote about The House of the Dead, he referred to absolute criminals. ‘In America we are now far out on a worse track. A hundred years ago Russia was still a religious country. We haven’t got the saints that are supposed to go with the sinners…’” The Lieutenant valued his acquaintance with the famous man. He himself, in his sixties, was working on a Ph. D. in criminology. On any topic of general interest Krieggstein was prepared to take a position immediately.