Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

“You Moose?”

“Yah. Who?”

“Kiyar sent me.”

“Come on.”

I felt as though I were falling into a big, warm, paved cellar. There was little to see, almost nothing. A sort of bar was set up, a few hanging fixtures, some tables from an ice cream parlor, wire-backed chairs. If you looked through the window of an English basement your eyes were at ground level. Here the glass was tarred over. There would have been nothing to see anyway: a yard, a wooden porch, a clothesline, wires, a back alley with ash heaps.

“Where did you come from, sister?” said Moose.

But Moose was a nobody here. The bartender, the one who counted, called me over and said, “What is it, sweetheart? You got a message for somebody?”

“Not exactly.”

“Oh? You needed a drink so bad that you jumped out of bed and ran straight over—you couldn’t stop to dress?”

“No, sir. I’m looking for somebody—Phil Haddis? The dentist?”

“There’s only one customer. Is that him?”

It wasn’t. My heart sank into river mud.

“It’s not a drunk you’re looking for?”

“No.”

The drunk was on a high stool, thin legs hanging down, arms forward, and his head lying sidewise on the bar. Bottles, glasses, a beer barrel. Behind the barkeeper was a sideboard pried from the wall of an apartment. It had a long mirror—an oval laid on its side. Paper streamers curled down from the pipes.

“Do you know the dentist I’m talking about?”

“I might. Might not,” said the barkeeper. He was a sloppy, long-faced giant—something of a kangaroo look about him. That was the long face in combination with the belly. He told me, “This is not a busy time. It’s dinner, you know, and we’re just a neighborhood speak.”

It was no more than a cellar, just as the barman was no more than a Greek, huge and bored. Just as I myself, Louie, was no more than a naked male in a woman’s dress. When you had named objects in this elementary way, hardly anything remained in them. The barman, on whom everything now depended, held his bare arms out at full reach and braced on his spread hands. The place smelled of yeast sprinkled with booze. He said, “You live around here?”

“No, about an hour on the streetcar.”

“Say more.”

“Humboldt Park is my neighborhood.”

“Then you got to be a Uke, a Polack, a Scandihoof, or a Jew.”

“Jew.”

“I know my Chicago. And you didn’t set out dressed like that. You’da frozen to death inside of ten minutes. It’s for the boudoir, not winter wear. You don’t have the shape of a woman, neither. The hips aren’t there. Are you covering a pair of knockers? I bet not. So what’s the story, are you a morphodite? Let me tell you, you got to give this Depression credit. Without it you’d never find out what kind of funny stuff is going on. But one thing I’ll never believe is that you’re a young girl and still got her cherry.”

“You’re right as far as that goes, but the rest of it is that I haven’t got a cent, and I need carfare.”

“Who took you, a woman?”

“Up in her room when I undressed, she grabbed my things and threw them out the window.”

“Left you naked so you couldn’t chase her… I would have grabbed her and threw her on the bed. I bet you didn’t even get in.”

Not even, I repeated to myself. Why didn’t I push her down while she was still in her coat, as soon as we entered the room—pull up her clothes, as he would have done? Because he was born to that. While I was not. I wasn’t intended for it.

“So that’s what happened. You got taken by a team of pros. She set you up. You were the mark. Jewish fellows aren’t supposed to keep company with those bad cunts. But when you get out of your house, into the world, you want action like anybody else. So. And where did you dig up this dress with the fancy big roses? I guess you were standing with your sticker sticking out and were lucky to find anything to put on. Was she a good-looker?”

Her breasts, as she lay there, had kept their shape. They didn’t slip sideward. The inward lines of her legs, thigh swelling toward thigh. The black crumpled hairs. Yes, a beauty, I would say.

Like the druggist, the barman saw the fun of the thing—an adolescent in a fix, a soiled dress, the rayon or sateen bed jacket. It was a lucky thing for me that business was at a standstill. If he had had customers, the barman wouldn’t have given me the time of day. “In short, you got mixed up with a whore and she gave you the works.”

For that matter, I had no sympathy for myself. I confessed that I had this coming, a high-minded Jewish schoolboy, too high-and-mighty to be Orthodox and with his eye on a special destiny. At home, inside the house, an archaic rule; outside, the facts of life. The facts of life were having their turn. Their first effect was ridicule. To throw my duds into the alley was the woman’s joke on me. The druggist with his pain-sensitive head was all irony. And now the barman was going to get his fun out of my trouble before he, maybe, gave me the seven cents for carfare. Then I could have a full hour of shame on the streetcar. My mother, with whom I might never speak again, used to say that I had a line of pride straight down the bridge of my nose, a foolish stripe that she could see.

I had no way of anticipating what her death would signify.

The barman, having me in place, was giving me the business. And Moose (“Moosey,” the Greek called him) had come away from the door so as not to miss the entertainment. The Greek’s kangaroo mouth turned up at the corners. Presently his hand went up to his head and he rubbed his scalp under the black, spiky hair. Some said they drank olive oil by the glass, these Greeks, to keep their hair so rich. “Now give it to me again, about the dentist,” said the barman.

“I came looking for him, but by now he’s well on his way home.”

He would by then be on the Broadway—Clark car, reading the Peach edition of the Evening American, a broad man with an innocent pout to his face, checking the race results. Anna had him dressed up as a professional man, but he let the fittings—shirt, tie, buttons—go their own way. His instep was fat and swelled inside the narrow shoe she had picked for him. He wore the fedora correctly. Toward the rest he admitted no obligation.

Anna cooked dinner after work, and when Philip came in, my father would begin to ask, “Where’s Louie?”

“Oh, he’s out delivering flowers,” they’d tell him. But the old man was nervous about his children after dark, and if they were late he waited up, walking—no, trotting—up and down the long apartment. When you tried to slip in, he caught you and twisted you tight by the neckband. He was small, neat, slender, a gentleman, but abrupt, not unworldly—he wasn’t ignorant of vices; he had lived in Odessa and even longer in St. Petersburg—but he had no patience. The least thing might craze him. Seeing me in this dress, he’d lose his head at once. I lost mine when that woman showed me her snatch with all the pink layers, when she raised up her arm and asked me to disconnect the wires, when I felt her skin and her fragrance come upward.

“What’s your family, what does your dad do?” asked the barman.

“His business is wood fuel for bakers’ ovens. It comes by freight car from northern Michigan. Also from Birnamwood, Wisconsin. He has a yard off Lake Street, east of Halsted.”

I made an effort to give the particulars. I couldn’t afford to be suspected of invention now.

“I know where that is. Now, that’s a neighborhood just full of hookers and cathouses. You think you can tell your old man what happened to you, that you got picked up by a cutie and she stole your clothes off you?”