Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

“That’s my mental lucidity. I’ve been having lucid impressions—like dreams, visions—instead of lucid ideas.”

“What’s this about?”

“Well, there’s shared knowledge that we don’t talk about. That deaf deep mining.”

“Like what?”

“Cryptic persistent suggestions: the dead are not really dead. Or, we don’t create thoughts, as that movie drip suggested. A thought is real, already created, and a real thought can pay you a visit. I think I understand why this happens to me. After so many years in the arts, you begin to assume that the value of life is bound up with the value of art. And there is no rational basis for this. Then you begin to suspect that it’s the ‘rational’ that lacks real meaning. Rationality would argue back that it’s the weakening of the organism that suggests this. A stupid argument.” Victor refrained from speaking of the erotic side of this—magical, aesthetic, erotic—or of what this final flare-up of eroticism might mean. It might mean that he was paying out from his last fibers for lucidity of impression and for sexual confirmation of the fact that he still existed. But full strength, strong fibers, only made you more capable of lying to yourself, of maintaining the mauvaise foi, the false description of your personal reality. He didn’t mention to Katrina the underground music which signified (had signified to Mark Antony) that the god Hercules was going away.

He changed the subject. He said to Katrina, “It’s a real laugh that Wrangel should mix me up in his mind with FDR.”

Roosevelt, too, was dying at a moment when to have strength was more necessary than ever. And hadn’t there been a woman with him at Warm Springs when he had his brain hemorrhage?

“Didn’t it ever occur to you?” said Katrina.

“It occurred, but I didn’t encourage the thought. Stalin made a complete fool of the man. Those trips to Teheran and Yalta must have been the death of him. They were ruinous physically. I’m certain that Stalin meant to hasten his death. Terrible journeys. Roosevelt felt challenged to demonstrate his vigor. Stalin didn’t budge. Roosevelt let himself be destroyed, proving his strength as chief of a great power, and also his ‘nobility.’”

Katrina, who had moved her round face closer—a girl posing for a “sweetheart snapshot,” cheek to cheek—said, “Aren’t you cold? Wouldn’t you like me to pull the covers over you? No? At least slide your fingers under me to warm up.”

To encourage him she turned on her side. A gambit she could always count on—the smooth shape of her buttocks, their créme de Chantilly whiteness. He always laughed when she offered herself this way, and put out his big, delicate hands. Something of a tough guy he really was, and particularly with age distortions—the wrecked Picasso Silenus reaching toward the nude beauty. She felt a sort of aristocratic delicacy from him even when he was manipulating these round forms of hers. It was really a bit crazy, the pride she took in her bottom. He matched up the freckles on each cheek—she had two prominent birthmarks—as if they were eyes. “Now you’re squinting. Now you’re crosseyed. Now you’re planning a conspiracy.” Victor paused and said, “This is what little Wrangel was saying about cartoons and abstractions, isn’t it? Making these faces?” Then he smoothed her gently and said, “It’s no figure of speech to say that your figure leaves me speechless.”

It was at this moment that the telephone began to ring, again and again—merciless. It was the desk. Their plane was just now landing. The limousine had started out. They were to be downstairs in five minutes.

They waited in the cold, under the bright lights. Victor had his stick and the mariner’s cap—the broad mustache, the wonderful face, the noble ease in all circumstances. The Thinker Prince. Never quite up to his great standard, she felt just a little clumsy beside him. She was in charge of the damned fiddle, too. To hold an instrument she couldn’t play. It turned her into a native bearer. She should set it on her head. And there they were on the edges of Detroit, standing on one of its crusts of light. Just like the other blasted cities of the northern constellation—Buffalo, Cleveland, Chicago, St. Louis—all those fields of ruin that looked so golden and beautiful by night.

“This is no limousine,” said Victor, irritated, when the car stopped. “It’s a goddamn compact Honda.”

But he made no further fuss about it. Opening the door of the car and taking a grip on the edge of the roof, he began to install himself in the front seat. First there was the stiff leg to get in, over on the driver’s end, by the brake, and then he eased in his head and his huge back so that, as he turned, the car was crammed to the top. Then he descended into the seat with patient, clever labor. It was like a difficult intromission. But as soon as he was in place, and while Katrina was settling herself in the back, he was already talking. Nerving himself for the approaching lecture, tuning up? “Did you ever get through the Céline book I gave you?”

“The Journey? I did, finally.”

“It’s not agreeable, but it is important. It’s one of those French things I’ve had on my mind.”

“Like the Baudelaire?”

“Right.” The driver had taken off swiftly by a dark side road, along fences. Victor made an effort to turn in the small seat; he wanted to look at her. Apparently he wished to make a statement not only in words but also with his face. “Didn’t you think Céline was truly terrifying? He uses the language that people everywhere really use. He expresses the ideas and feelings they really share.”

“Last time we spoke about it you said those were the ideas that made France collapse in 1940. And that the Germans also had those same ideas.”

“I don’t think that was exactly what I said. Talking about nihilism…”

Why had he asked her to read that book? Toward the end of it—a nightmare—a certain adventurer named Robinson refused to tell a woman that he loved her, and this “loving” woman, enraged, had shot him dead. Not even when she pointed the gun at him in the taxicab could she make him say the words “I love you.” The “loving” woman was really a maniac, while the man, the “lover,” although he was himself a crook, a deadbeat, a murderer, had one shred of honor left, and that, too, was in the terminal stage. Better dead than carried off for life by this loony ogress whom he would have to pretend to “love.” It wasn’t so much the book that had shocked Katrina—a book was only a book—but the fact that he, Victor, had told her to read it. Of course, he was always pushing the widest possible perspective of historical reality. The whole universe was his field of operations. A cosmopolitan in the fullest sense, a giant of comprehension, he was located in the central command post of comprehension. “Face the destructive facts. No palliatives,” was the kind ofthing he said.

“That book was next door to the murder camps,” she said.

“I don’t deny it.”

“Well, back at the hotel you said that alert people everywhere were recognizing the same facts. But same isn’t quite the way it was in the Céline book. Not even for you, Victor.”

There was no time to answer. The car had stopped at the small private-aircraft building. When the driver ran from the front seat to open her door, she thought his face was distorted. Maybe it was only the cold that made him grimace. Extricating himself from the car, Victor again caught at the roof and hopped backward, drawing out the bad leg.

They entered the overilluminated shack. At the counter, where phones were jingling, Trina gave the name Wulpy to the dispatcher. The man said, “Yes, your Cessna is on the ground. It’ll taxi up in a few minutes.”