Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

“At Hamilton’s that afternoon, I wore a miniskirt suit that showed my knees touching. I haven’t got knock-knees, just this minor peculiarity about the inside of my legs…. If this is a deformity, it did me good. Ithiel was crazy about it.”

At a later time, she mentioned this as “the unforeseen usefulness of anomalies.” She wrote that on a piece of paper and let it drift about the house with other pieces of paper, so that if asked what it meant, she could say she had forgotten.

Although Ithiel now and again might mention “game theory” or “MAD,” he wouldn’t give out information that might be classified, and she didn’t even try to understand what he did in Washington. Now and then his name turned up in the Times as a consultant on international security, and for a couple of years he was an adviser to the chairman of a Senate committee. She let politics alone, asking no questions. The more hidden his activities, the better she felt about him. Power, danger, secrecy made him even sexier. No loose talk. A woman could feel safe with a man like Ithiel.

It was marvelous luck that the little apartment in Chelsea should be so near Penn Station. When he blew into town he telephoned, and in fifteen minutes he was there, holding his briefcase. It was his habit when he arrived to remove his necktie and stuff it in among his documents. It was her habit when she hung up the phone to take the ring from its locked drawer, admire it on her finger, and kiss it when the doorbell rang.

No, Ithiel didn’t make a big public career, he wasn’t a team player, he had no talent for administration; he was too special in his thinking, and there was no chance that he would reach cabinet level. Anyway, it was too easy for him to do well as a free agent; he wouldn’t latch on to politicians with presidential ambitions: the smart ones never would make it. “And besides,” he said, “I like to stay mobile.” A change of continent when he wanted fresh air. He took on such assignments as pleased the operator in him, the behind-the-scenes Teddy Regler: in the Persian Gulf, with a Japanese whiskey firm looking for a South American market, with the Italian police tracking terrorists. None of these activities compromised his Washington reputation for dependability. He testified before congressional investigative committees as an expert witness.

In their days of intimacy, Clara more than once helped him to make a deadline. Then they were Teddy and Clara, a superteam working around the clock. He knew how dependable she was, a dervish for work, how quickly she grasped unfamiliar ideas, how tactful she could be. From her side, she was aware how analytically deep he could go, what a range of information he had, how good his reports were. He outclassed everybody, it seemed to her. Once, at the Hotel Cristallo in Cortina d’Ampezzo, they did a document together, to the puncturing rhythm of the tennis court below. He had to read the pages she was typing for him over the transatlantic telephone. While he spoke, he let her run ahead on the machine. He could trust her to organize his notes and write them up in a style resembling his own (not that style mattered in Washington). All but the restricted material. She’d do any amount of labor—long dizzy days at the tinny lightweight Olivetti—to link herself with him.

As she told Ms. Wong, she had seen a book many years ago in the stacks of the Columbia library. A single title had detached itself from the rest, from thousands: The Human Pair. Well, the big-boned blond student doing research and feeling (unaware) so volcanic that one of her controls was to hold her breath—at the sight of those gilded words on the spine of a book was able to breathe again. She breathed. She didn’t take the book down; she didn’t want to read it. “I wanted not to read it.”

She described this to Laura Wong, who was too polite to limit her, too discreet to direct her confidences into suitable channels. You had to listen to everything that came out of Clara’s wild head when she was turned on. Ms. Wong applied these personal revelations to her own experience of life, as anybody else would have done. She had been married too. Five years an American wife. Maybe she had even been in love. She never said. You’d never know.

“The full title was The Human Pair in the Novels of Thomas Hardy. At school I loved Hardy, but now all I wanted of that book was the title. It came back to me at Cortina. Ithiel and I were the Human Pair. We took a picnic lunch up to the forest behind the Cristallo—cheese, bread, cold cuts, pickles, and wine. I rolled on top of Ithiel and fed him. Later I found out when I tried it myself how hard it is to swallow in that position.

“I now feel, looking back, that I was carrying too much of an electrical charge. It’s conceivable that the world-spirit gets into mere girls and makes them its demon interpreters. I mentioned this to Ithiel a while back—he and I are old enough now to discuss such subjects—and he said that one of his Russian dissident pals had been talking to him about something called’superliterature’—literature being the tragedy or comedy of private lives, while superliterature was about the possible end of the world. Beyond personal history. In Cortina I thought I was acting from personal emotions, but those emotions were so devouring, fervid, that they may have been suprapersonal—a wholesome young woman in love expressing the tragedy or comedy of the world concluding. A fever using love as its carrier.

“After the holiday we drove down to Milan. Actually, that’s where I met Spontini. We were at a fancy after-dinner party, and he said, ‘Let me give you a ride back to your hotel.’ So Ithiel and I got into his Jaguar with him, and we were escorted by carloads of cops, fore and aft. He was proud of his security; this was when the Red Brigades were kidnapping the rich. It wasn’t so easy to be rich—rich enough for ransom. Mike said, ‘For all I know, my own friend Giangiacomo may have a plan to abduct me. Not Giangiacomo personally but the outfit he belongs to.’

“On that same trip Ithiel and I also spent some time with Giangiacomo the billionaire revolutionist himself. He was a kind, pleasant man, good-looking except for his preposterous Fidel Castro getup, like a little kid from Queens in a cowboy suit. He wore a forage cap, and in a corner of his fancy office there was a machine gun on the floor. He invited Ithiel and me to his chтteau, about eighty kilometers away, eighteenth-century rococo: it might have been a set for The Marriage of Figaro, except for the swimming pool with algae in it and a sauna alongside, in the dank part of the garden far down the hill. At lunch, the butler was leaning over with truffles from Giangiacomo’s own estate to grate over the creme veloutée, and he couldn’t because Giangiacomo was waving his arms, going on about revolutionary insurgency, the subject of the book he was writing. Then, when Ithiel told him that there were no views like his in Karl Marx, Giangiacomo said, ‘I never read Marx, and it’s too late now to do it; it’s urgent to act.’ He drove us back to Milan in the afternoon at about five hundred miles an hour. Lots of action, let me tell you. I covered my emerald and gripped it with my right hand, to protect it, maybe, in a crash.

“Next day, when we flew out, Giangiacomo was at the airport in battle dress with a group of boutique girls, all in minis. A year or two later he blew himself up while trying to dynamite power lines. I was sad about it.”

When they returned to New York in stuffy August, back to the apartment in Chelsea, Clara cooked Ithiel a fine Italian dinner of veal with lemon and capers, as good as, or better than, the Milan restaurants served, or Giangiacomo’s chef at the lovely toy chтteau. At work in the narrow New York galley-style kitchen, Clara was naked and wore clogs. To make it tender, she banged the meat with a red cast-iron skillet. In those days she wore her hair long. Whether she was dressed or nude, her movements always were energetic; she didn’t know the meaning of slow-time.