Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

O Dotey! bragging and deploring in the same breath. Dotey’s husband had owned a small plastics factory. It was already going under when he died. So now she had to hustle plastic products. Her son was working for an MBA but not at a first-rate school. A woman in her situation needed a good address, and the rent she paid in Oldtown was outrageous. “For this kind of dough they could exterminate the rats. But I signed a two-year lease, and the landlord laughs at me.” Forced into the business world, she sounded more and more like Father. But she hated the hustling. It was death to Dorothea to have to go anywhere, to have to do anything. To get out of bed in the morning was more than she could bear. Filtering her coffee, she cursed blindly, the soaring eyes filled with rage when the kettle whistled. To drag the comb through her hair she had to muster all her strength. As she herself said, “Like the lady in Racine: ‘Tout me nuit, et conspire р me nuire.’” (Taking a Chicago dig at her French education, a French dig at Chicago.) “Only Phédre is you, baby, sick with love.”

Dorothea drove herself, trembling, out of the house. Think how hard it was for her to call on chain-store buyers and institutional purchasing agents. She even managed to get on the tube to promote her product, wangling invitations from UHF ethnic and Moral Majority stations as a Woman Executive. Sometimes she seemed to be fainting under her burdens, purple lids closing. On the air, however, she was unfailingly vivacious and put on a charming act. And when she was aroused, she was very tough. “Let Wulpy go home if he’s sick. Why doesn’t his wife come fetch him?”

“Don’t forget, I almost lost Victor last year,” said Katrina.

“ You almost… almost lost him. ”

“It’s true you had surgery the same week, and I had to be away, but you weren’t on the critical list, Dotey.”

“I wasn’t referring to me but to his wife, that poor woman, and what she suffered from you and other lady friends…. If she had to leave the room, this ding-a-ling broad from Evanston would rush in and throw herself on the sick man.”

No use telling Dotey not to be so rude and vulgar. Katrina listened to her with a certain passivity, even with satisfaction—it amounted, almost, to pleasure. You might call it perturbation-pleasure. Dotey continued: “It isn’t right that the man should use his mighty prestige on a poor lady from the suburbs. It’s shooting fish in a barrel. You’ll tell me that you have the magical secret, how to turn him on….”

“I don’t think that it’s what I do, Dotey. It happens simply to be me. He even loves my varicose veins, which I would try to hide from somebody else. Or my uneven gum line, and that was my lifelong embarrassment. And when my eyes are puffy, even that draws him.”

“Christ, that’s it then,” said Dorothea, testy. “You hold the lucky number. With you he gets it up.”

Katrina thought: Why should we talk so intimately if there isn’t going to be any sympathy? It was sad. But on a more reasonable view you couldn’t blame Dorothea for being irritable, angry, and envious. She had a failing business to run. She needed a husband. She had no prospects to speak of. She hates the fact that I’m now completely out of her league, Katrina told herself. Over these four years I’ve met people like John Cage, Bucky Fuller, de Kooning. I come home and tell her how I chatted with Jackie Onassis or Françoise de la Renta. All she has to tell me is how hard it is to push her plastic bags, and how nasty and evil-minded those purchasing agents are.

Dorothea had lost patience. When she thought that the affair with Victor was a flash in the pan, she had been more tolerant, willing to listen. Katrina had even persuaded her to read some of Victor’s articles. They had started with an easy one, “From Apollinaire to E. E. Cummings,” but then went on to more difficult texts, like “Paul Valéry and the Complete Mind,”

“Marxism in Modern French Thought.” They didn’t tackle Marx himself, but they had French enough between them to do Valéry’s Monsieur Teste, and they met for lunch at Old Orchard Shopping Center to discuss this strange book. First they looked at clothes, for with so many acres of luxurious merchandise about them it would have been impossible to concentrate immediately on Teste. Katrina had always tried to widen her horizons. For many years she had taken flying lessons. She was licensed to pilot a single-engine plane. After a lapse of twenty years she had tried to resume piano lessons. She had studied the guitar, she kept up her French at the center on Ontario Street. Once, during the worst of times, she had taken up foreign sports cars, driving round and round the north suburbs with no destination. She had learned lots of Latin, for which she had no special use. At one time she considered going into law, and had passed the aptitude test with high marks. Trying to zero in on some kind of perfection. And then in a booth at Old Orchard, Katrina and Dorothea had smoked cigarettes and examined Valéry: What was the meaning of the complete mind, “man as full consciousness”? Why did it make Madame Teste happy to be studied by her husband, as happy to be studied as to be loved? Why did she speak of him as “the angel of pure consciousness”? To grasp Valéry was hard enough. Wulpy on Valéry was utterly inaccessible to Dorothea, and she demanded that Trina explain. “Here he compares Monsieur Teste to Karl Marx—what does he mean by that?”

“Well,” said Katrina, trying hard, “let’s go back to this statement. It says, ‘Minds that come from the void into this strange carnival and bring lucidity from outside Then Dotey cried, “ Which void?” She wore the poodle hairdo as a cover for or an admission of the limitations of her bony head. But even this may have been a ruse, as she was really very clever in her way. Only her bosom was filled with a boiling mixture of sisterly feelings, vexation, resentment. She would bear with Katrina for a while and then she would say, “What is it with you and the intelligentsia? Because we went to the Pont Royal bar and none of those philosophers tried to pick us up? Or are you competing intellectually with the mans wife?”

No, Beila Wulpy had no such pretensions. The role of the great man’s wife was what she played. She did it with dignity. Dark and stout, beautiful in her way, she reminded you of Catherine of Aragon—abused majesty. Although she was not herself an intellectual, she knew very well what it was to be one—the real thing. She was a clever woman.

Katrina tried to answer. “The strange carnival is the history of civilization as it strikes a detached mind….”

“We don’t play in this league,” said Dotey at last. “It’s not for types like us, Trina. And your brain is not the organ he’s interested in.”

“And I believe I’m equal to this, too, in a way of my own,” said Katrina, obstinate. Trying to keep the discussion under control. “Types like us” wounded her, and she felt that her eyes were turning turbid. She met the threat of tears, or of sobs, by sinking into what she had always called her “flesh state”: her cheeks grew thick, and she felt physically incompetent, gross. Dotey spoke with a harshness acquired from her City Hall father: “I’m just a broad who has to hustle plastic bags to creeps who proposition me.” Katrina understood well enough that when Dotey said, “I’m a broad,” she was telling her, “That’s what you are, too.” Then Dotey said, “Don’t give me the’strange carnival’ bit.” She added, “What about your elephant?”

This was a cheap shot. Katrina had been trying for some time to write a children’s story about an elephant. She hoped to make some money by it, and to establish her independence. It had been a mistake to mention this to Dotey. She had done it because it was a story often told in the family. “That old elephant thing that Dad used to tell us? I’m going to put it to use.” But for one reason and another she hadn’t yet worked out the details. It was mean of Dotey to get at her through the elephant. The Valéry discussions at Old Orchard had ended with this dig.