Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

After a year at Columbia she went to work at Reuters, then she taught in a private school and later wrote American feature articles for British and Australian papers. By the age of forty she had formed a company of her own—a journalistic agency specializing in high fashion for women—and eventually she sold this company to an international publishing group and became one of its executives. In the boardroom she was referred to by some as “a good corporate person,” by others as “the czarina of fashion writing.” By now she was also the attentive mother of three small girls. The first of these was conceived with some difficulty (the professional assistance of gynecologists made it possible). The father of these children was Clara’s fourth husband.

Three of the four had been no more than that—men who fell into the husband class. Only one, the third, had been something like the real thing. That was Spontini the oil tycoon, a close friend of the billionaire leftist and terrorist Giangiacomo F., who blew himself up in the seventies. (Some Italians said, predictably, that the government had set him up to explode.) Mike Spontini was not political, but then he wasn’t born rich, like Giangiacomo, whose role model had been Fidel Castro. Spontini made his own fortune. His looks, his town houses and chтteaus and yachts, would have qualified him for a role in La Dolce Vita. Scores of women were in pursuit. Clara had won the fight to marry him but lost the fight to keep him. Recognizing at last that he was getting rid of her, she didn’t oppose this difficult, arbitrary man and surrendered all property rights in the settlement—a nonsettlement really. He took away the terrific gifts he had made her, down to the last bracelet. No sooner had the divorce come through than Mike was bombed out by two strokes. He was half paralyzed now and couldn’t form his words. An Italian Sairey Gamp type took care of him in Venice, where Clara occasionally went to see him. Her ex-husband would give her an animal growl, one glare of rage, and then resume his look of imbecility. He would rather be an imbecile on the Grand Canal than a husband on Fifth Avenue.

The other husbands—one married in a full-dress church wedding, the others routine City Hall jobs—were… well, to be plain about it, gesture-husbands. Velde was big and handsome, indolent, defiantly incompetent. He worked on the average no longer than six months at any job. By then everybody in the organization wanted to kill him.

His excuse for being in and out of work was that his true talent was for campaign strategies. Elections brought out the best in him: getting media attention for his candidate, who never, ever, won in the primaries. But then, he disliked being away from home, and an election is a traveling show. “Very sweet” went one of Clara’s summaries to Laura Wong, the Chinese American dress designer who was her confidante. “An affectionate father as long as the kids don’t bother him, what Wilder mostly does is sit reading paperbacks—thrillers, science fiction, and pop biographies. I think he feels that all will be well as long as he keeps sitting there on his cushions. To him inertia is the same as stability. Meantime I run the house single-handed: mortgage, maintenance, housemaids, au pair girls from France or Scandinavia—Austrian the latest. I dream up projects for the children, I do the school bit, do the dentist and the pediatrician, plus playmates, outings, psychological tests, doll dressing, cutting and pasting valentines. What else…? Work with their secret worries, sort out their quarrels, encourage their minds, wipe tears. Love them. Wilder just goes on reading P. D. James, or whoever, till I’m ready to snatch the book and throw it in the street.”

One Sunday afternoon she did exactly that—opened the window first and skimmed his paperback into Park Avenue.

“Was he astonished?” asked Ms. Wong.

“Not absolutely. He sees how provoking he is. What he doesn’t allow is that I have reason to be provoked. He’s there, isn’t he? What else do I want? In all the turbulence, he’s the point of calm. And for all the wild times and miseries I had in the love game—about which he has full information—he’s the answer. A sexy woman who couldn’t find the place to put her emotionality, and appealing to brilliant men who couldn’t do what she really wanted done.”

“And he does do?”

“He’s the overweening overlord, and for no other reason than sexual performance. It’s stud power that makes him so confident. He’s not the type to think it out. I have to do that. A sexy woman may delude herself about the gratification of a mental life. But what really settles everything, according to him, is masculine bulk. As close as he comes to spelling it out, his view is that I wasted time on Jaguar nonstarters. Lucky for me I came across a genuine Rolls-Royce. But he’s got the wrong car,” she said, crossing the kitchen with efficient haste to take the kettle off the boil. Her stride was powerful, her awkward, shapely legs going too quickly for the heels to keep pace. “Maybe a Lincoln Continental would be more like it. Anyway, no woman wants her bedroom to be a garage, and least of all for a boring car.”

What was a civilized lady like Laura Wong making of such confidences? The raised Chinese cheek with the Chinese eye let into it, the tiny degree of heaviness of the epicanthic fold all the whiter over the black of the eye, and the light of that eye, so foreign to see and at the same time superfamiliar in its sense… What could be more human than the recognition of this familiar sense? And yet Laura Wong was very much a New York lady in her general understanding of things. She did not confide in Clara as fully as Clara confided in her. But then who did, who could make a clean breast so totally? What Ms. Wong’s rich eyes suggested, Clara in her awkwardness tried in fact to say. To do.

“Yes, the books,” said Laura. “You can’t miss that.” She had also seen Wilder Velde pedaling his Exercycle while the TV ran at full volume.

“He can’t understand what’s wrong, since what I make looks like enough for us. But I don’t earn all that much, with three kids in private schools. So family money has to be spent. That involves my old parents—sweet old Bible Hoosiers. I can’t make him see that I can’t afford an unemployed husband, and there isn’t a headhunter in New York who’ll talk to Wilder after one look at his curriculum vitae and his job record. Three months here, five months there. Because it’s upsetting me, and for my sake, my bosses are trying to place him somewhere. I’m important enough to the corporation for that. If he loves elections so much, maybe he should run for office. He looks congressional, and what do I care if he screws up in the House of Representatives. I’ve been with congressmen, I even married one, and he’s no dumber than they are. But he won’t admit that anything is wrong; he’s got that kind of confidence in himself—so much that he can even take a friendly interest in the men I’ve been involved with. They’re like failed competitors to the guy who won the silver trophy. He’s proud to claim a connection with the famous ones, and when I went to visit poor Mike in Venice, he flew with me.”

“So he isn’t jealous,” said Laura Wong.

“The opposite. The people I’ve been intimate with, to him are like the folks in a history book. And suppose Richard III or Metternich had gotten into your wife’s pants when she was a girl? Wilder is a name-dropper, and the names he most enjoys dropping are the ones he came into by becoming my husband. Especially the headliners…”

Laura Wong was of course aware that it was not for her to mention the most significant name of all, the name that haunted all of Clara’s confidences. That was for Clara herself to bring up. Whether it was appropriate, whether she could summon the strength to deal with the most persistent of her preoccupations, whether she would call on Laura to bear with her one more time… these were choices you had to trust her to make tactfully.