Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

When the woman slipped down from the leather table she gripped her leg and said she had pulled a muscle. She lifted one heel onto a chair and rubbed her calf, swearing under her breath and looking everywhere with swimming eyes. And then, after she had put on her skirt and fastened her stockings to the garter belt, she pushed her feet into her pumps and limped around the chair, holding it by the arm. She said, “Will you please reach me my coat? Just put it over my shoulders.”

She, too, wore a raccoon. As I took it from the hook I wished it had been something else. But Stephanie’s coat was newer than this one and twice as heavy. These pelts had dried out, and the fur was thin. The woman was already on her way out, and stooped as I laid the raccoon over over her back. Marchek’s office had its own exit to the corridor.

At the top of the staircase, the woman asked me to help her down. I said that I would, of course, but I wanted to look once more for my brother-in-law. As she tied the woolen scarf under her chin she smiled at me, with an Oriental wrinkling of her eyes.

Not to check in with Philip wouldn’t have been right. My hope was that he would be returning, coming down the narrow corridor in his burly, sauntering, careless way. You won’t remember your Uncle Philip. He had played college football, and he still had the look of a tackle, with his swelling, compact forearms. (At Soldier Field today he’d be physically insignificant; in his time, however, he was something of a strongman.)

But there was the long strip of carpet down the middle of the wall-valley, and no one was coming to rescue me. I turned back to his office. If only a patient were sitting in the chair and I could see Philip looking into his mouth, I’d be on track again, excused from taking the woman’s challenge. One alternative was to say that I couldn’t go with her, that Philip expected me to ride back with him to the Northwest Side. In the empty office I considered this lie, bending my head so that I wouldn’t confront the clock with its soundless measured weights revolving. Then I wrote on Philip’s memo pad: “Louie, passing by.” I left it on the seat of the chair.

The woman had put her arms through the sleeves of the collegiate, rah-rah raccoon and was resting her fur-bundled rear on the banister. She was passing her compact mirror back and forth, and when I came out she gave the compact a snap and dropped it into her purse.

“Still the charley horse?”

“My lower back too.”

We descended, very slow, both feet on each tread. I wondered what she would do if I were to kiss her. Laugh at me, probably. We were no longer between the four walls where anything might have happened. In the street, space was unlimited. I had no idea how far we were going, how far I would be able to go. Although she was the one claiming to be in pain, it was I who felt sick. She asked me to support her lower back with my hand, and there I discovered what an extraordinary action her hips could perform. At a party I had overheard an older woman saying to another lady, “I know how to make them burn.” Hearing this was enough for me.

No special art was necessary with a boy of seventeen, not even so much as being invited to support her with my hand—to feel that intricate, erotic working of her back. I had already seen the woman on Marchek’s examining table and had also felt the full weight of her when she leaned—when she laid her female substance on me. Moreover, she fully knew my mind. She was the thing I was thinking continually, and how often does thought find its object in circumstances like these—the object knowing that it has been found? The woman knew my expectations. She was, in the flesh, those expectations. I couldn’t have sworn that she was a hooker, a tramp. She might have been an ordinary family girl with a taste for trampishness, acting loose, amusing herself with me, doing a comic sex turn as in those days people sometimes did.

“Where are we headed?”

“If you have to go, I can make it on my own,” she said. “It’s just Winona Street, the other side of Sheridan Road.”

“No, no. I’ll walk you there.”

She asked whether I was still at school, pointing to the printed pages in my coat pocket.

I observed when we were passing a fruit shop (a boy of my own age emptying bushels of oranges into the lighted window) that, despite the woman’s thick-cream color, her eyes were Far Eastern, black.

“You should be about seventeen,” she said.

“Just.”

She was wearing pumps in the snow and placed each step with care.

“What are you going to be—have you picked your profession?”

I had no use for professions. Utterly none. There were accountants and engineers in the soup lines. In the world slump, professions were useless. You were free, therefore, to make something extraordinary of yourself. I might have said, if I hadn’t been excited to the point of sickness, that I didn’t ride around the city on the cars to make a buck or to be useful to the family, but to take a reading or this boring, depressed, ugly, endless, rotting city. I couldn’t have thought it then, but I now understand that my purpose was to interpret this place. Its power was tremendous. But so was mine, potentially. I refused absolutely to believe for a moment that people here were doing what they thought they were doing. Beneath the apparent life of these streets was their real life, beneath each face the real face, beneath each voice and its words the true tone and the real message. Of course, I wasn’t about to say such things. It was beyond me at that time to say them. I was, however, a high-toned kid, “La-di-dah,” my critical, satirical brother Albert called me. A high purpose in adolescence will expose you to that.

At the moment, a glamorous, sexual girl had me in tow. I couldn’t guess where I was being led, nor how far, nor what she would surprise me with, nor the consequences.

“So the dentist is your brother?”

“In-law—my sister’s husband. They live with us. You’re asking what he’s like? He’s a good guy. He likes to lock his office on Friday and go to the races. He takes me to the fights. Also, at the back of the drugstore there’s a poker game….”

“He doesn’t go around with books in his pocket.”

“Well, no, he doesn’t. He says, ‘What’s the use? There’s too much to keep up or catch up with. You could never in a thousand years do it, so why knock yourself out?’ My sister wants him to open a Loop office, but that would be too much of a strain. I guess he’s for inertia. He’s not ready to do more than he’s already doing.”

“So what are you reading—what’s it about?”

I didn’t propose to discuss anything with her. I wasn’t capable of it. What I had in mind just then was entirely different.

But suppose I had been able to explain. One does have a responsibility to answer genuine questions: “You see, miss, this is the visible world. We live in it, we breathe its air and eat its substance. When we die, however, matter goes to matter, and then we’re annihilated. Now, which world do we really belong to, this world of matter or another world, from which matter takes its orders?”

Not many people were willing to talk about such notions. They made even Stephanie impatient. “When you die, that’s it. Dead is dead,” she would say. She loved a good time. And when I wouldn’t take her downtown to the Oriental Theatre she didn’t deny herself the company of other boys. She brought back off-color vaudeville jokes. I think the Oriental was part of a national entertainment circuit. Jimmy Savo, Lou Holtz, and Sophie Tucker played there. I was sometimes too solemn for Stephanie. When she gave imitations of Jimmy Savo singing “River, Stay Away from My Door,” bringing her knees together and holding herself tight, she didn’t break me up, and she was disappointed.