Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

“Can we go up to the room, Victor? You have a rest. I have to use the phone.”

They made their way to the hotel desk. They were expected. Victor signed the card and he refused a bellhop. “We don’t want help. Nothing to carry. We’re just waiting for our plane.” Why should it cost a buck to put the key in the lock?

When he came into the room, Victor pitched himself heavily on the bed and Katrina removed his shoes. They must have been size sixteen. Nevertheless, his feet were delicate in shape. A human warmth was released from these shoes when she pulled them off. She stacked pillows behind his head. As he made himself comfortable, he was aware again of the bristling of nerve ends in the belly. Surgical damage. The frayed ends of copper wires. Hair-darts ingrown.

“I’m calling my sister. Don’t worry, I’ll tell the operator to cut in.”

She went down the list of numbers Dotey had given her. People answered who were rude and hung up—behavior was getting worse and worse. At last she reached her sister, who said she was on the far South Side, fifteen miles from home, twenty-five from Evanston. Hazardous driving. “Too bad about all this snow,” she said. It was, however, satisfaction and not sympathy that her voice expressed.

“Did you call Evanston? Is Ysole there?”

“Ysole wanted me to tell her where you were. She didn’t believe you were in Schaumburg. She said that Krieggstein phoned in several times. He does stand by you, doesn’t he? He’s in love with you, Trina.”

“He’s a friend to me.”

“Where are you, by the way?”

“We had to land in Detroit.”

“Detroit! Jesus! I heard that O’Hare was closing. Can you get back?”

“A little late. Not too much. Did Ysole say that Alfred had called? By now the psychiatrist has told the lawyer about the canceled appointment, and if his lawyer has heard, so has mine.”

“You encourage Krieggstein too much,” said Dotey.

“I’m one of many. He courts ten ladies at a time.”

“So he says. It’s you he’s fascinated by. After Victor goes, he’ll close in. You may be too beat to resist him.”

“You’re being very ugly to me, Dorothea.”

Victor had pulled a pillow over the top of his head like a cowl. His eyes were closed, and he said, “Don’t tangle with her. Bottle up your feelings.”

“Let’s conclude. I’m tying up a customer’s line,” said Dotey.

“I count on you to stand by….”

“To go to Evanston tonight is out of the question. I’ve accepted a dinner invitation.”

“You didn’t mention that last night.”

“I’m sitting with business associates,” Dotey was saying. “You can reach me at home between six and eight.”

“All right,” said Katrina. Very quietly, obedient to Victor, she put down the phone.

“Be a sweetheart and turn off the air-conditioning, Katrina. I hate this fucking false airflow in hotels. The motor gets me down. These places more and more resemble funeral parlors.”

Katrina’s face as she turned the switch was blotched with the stings her sister had inflicted on her. “Dotey has like an instinct against me. When I’m in trouble she’s always ready to give me more lumps.”

“You’ll manage without her. We’ll fly back in an executive jet. You’ll go to Evanston in a limousine.” To these words of comfort Victor added, “The kids love a snowfall. They’re out playing, and they’re happy. I’d give you odds.” Even he was somewhat surprised by the gentleness of his tone. He was in a melting mood. It seemed to him that even when making faces at Wrangel he hadn’t felt harsh—playful rather. How to see such an occurrence: Chief Iffucan, the Indian in his caftan, the old man with henna hackles. Barbarous charm. It was possible for Wulpy to take such a view. The irritation of his scars had abated. He did not listen to Katrina’s next conversation, which was with Ysole. What he was led to consider (again, a frequent subject) was the limits he had never until lately reckoned with. Now he touched limits on every side: “Thou hast appointed his bounds that he cannot pass.” For the representative of American energy and action these omnipresent touchable bounds were funny-lamentable. What was a weak “barbarian”? Newfangled men needed strength. Philosophers of action must be able to act. Of course, Wulpy had had his intimations of helplessness (the biblical “appointed bounds” didn’t count, those were from another life—theyivrach katzail, “he fleeth as a shadow,” he had studied as a boy). The bad leg had not been a limitation. It had been an aid to ascendancy. As perhaps the foot of Oedipus had been. But no longer than three years ago he had had his mother lying in the backseat of his beat-up Pontiac, serving for the afternoon as an ambulance. An old cousin had telephoned to say that his mother was virtually speechless in the nursing home where he kept her. He had finally gone to inspect this unspeakable tenement. He packed her bag and checked her out of there. That afternoon, a day of killing heat, he drove from one joint to another and tried to place her. He visited nursing homes, locking her in the car (bad neighborhoods) while he climbed stairs—the torment of getting two feet on each tread—to look at bedrooms, enter kitchens and bathrooms, and discuss terms with a bedlam population of “administrators,” otherwise “dollar psychotics,” who tore the money from you. (Not that he didn’t fight for every buck. “Licensed abuse,” he told them. “A horrible rip-off.”) At four o’clock he had still not found the right place for her, that semiconscious regal monument in the backseat of his jalopy. And while he drove around Astoria and Jackson Heights, Katrina—in fantasy—drove her car behind him, tailgating him between red walls of dead brick. This imaginary Katrina wore nothing but a coat, under which she was naked, in a state of sexual readiness. When he parked and hobbled into a building, he imagined that she had pulled up behind, invisibly, and that she was streaming under the buckled Aquascutum coat. That this was a commonplace fantasy, he knew well. But he accepted it. Apparently he needed to imagine the woman-slime odor—that swamp-smell—and the fever that came with it was peculiarly his. At last Wulpy had found a good place, or maybe just gave up, and his mother was carried in while he wrote the check. The old girl seemed indifferent by now. In a matter of months she was dead, leaving Victor with his ideas and his travels, his erotic activities—the whole vivid stir: an important man, making important statements, publishing important articles. Shortly after his mother died, he himself entered Mass. General. There he escaped death, but became aware that it was necessary to consider the appointed bounds. Something like a great river was going to change its course. A Mississippi was about to find a new bed. Whole cities would drown. Mansions would float across the Gulf of Mexico, lifted from their foundations, and come aground on the sands of Venezuela.

“Where are you anyway, Trina?” said Ysole.

“I had to attend a meeting in Schaumburg, and I’m stuck out here.”

“All right,” said Ysole. “Give me that suburban number where you’re at.” When Katrina made no answer, Ysole said, “You never would tell the truth if you could lie instead.”

Look at it this way: There was a howling winter space between them. The squat Negro woman with her low deformed hips who pressed the telephone to her ear, framed in white hair, was far shrewder than Katrina and was (with a black nose and brown mouth formed by nature for amusement) amused by her lies and antics. Katrina considered. Suppose that I told her, “I’m in a Detroit motel with Victor Wulpy. And right now he’s getting out of bed to go to the bathroom.” What use could such facts be to her? Ysole said, “Your friend the cop and your sister both checked in with me.”