Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

Stretched on the bed, Ithiel studied his dangerous documents (all those forbidden facts) while she cooked and the music played; the shades were down, the lights were on, and they enjoyed a wonderful privacy. “When I was a kid and we went on holidays to the Jersey coast during the war,” Clara recalled, “we had black window blinds because of the German submarines hiding out there under the Atlantic, but we could play our radios as loud as we wanted.” She liked to fancy that she was concealing Ithiel and his secret documents—not that the deadly information affected Ithiel enough to change the expression of his straight profile: “concentrating like Jascha Heifetz.” Could anybody have been tailing him? Guys with zoom lenses or telescopic sights on the Chelsea rooftops?

Ithiel smiled, and pooh-poohed this. He wasn’t that important. “I’m not rich like Spontini.” They might rather be trained on Clara, zeroing in on a Daughter of Albion without a stitch on, he said.

In those days he came frequently from Washington to visit his young son, who lived with his mother on East Tenth Street. Ithiel’s ex-wife, who now used her maiden name, Etta Wolfenstein, went out of her way to be friendly to Clara, chatted her up on the telephone. Etta had informants in Washington, who kept an eye on Ithiel. Ithiel was indifferent to gossip. “I’m not the president,” he would say to Clara, “that bulletins should go out about my moods and movements.”

“I shouldn’t have blamed Ithiel for taking a woman out to dinner now and then in Washington. He needed plain, ordinary quiet times. I turned on so much power in those days. Especially after midnight, my favorite time to examine my psyche—what love was; and death; and hell and eternal punishment; and what Ithiel was going to cost me in the judgment of God when I closed my eyes on this world forever. All my revivalist emotions came out after one A. M., whole nights of tears, anguish and hysteria. I drove him out of his head. To put a stop to this, he’d have to marry me. Then he’d never again have to worry. All my demon power would be at his service. But meanwhile if he got an hour’s sleep toward morning and time enough to shave before his first appointment, he’d swallow his coffee, saying that he looked like Lazarus in his shroud. He was vain of his good looks too,” said Clara to Ms. Wong. “Maybe that’s why I chose that kind of punishment, to put rings under his eyes. Once he said that he had to outline a piece of legislation for the Fiat people—they were trying to get a bill passed in Congress—and they’d think he’d spent the night at an orgy and now couldn’t get his act together.”

Clara wasn’t about to tell Teddy that in Milan when Mike Spontini had invited her to sit in front with him, she had found the palm of his hand waiting for her on the seat, and she had lifted herself up immediately and given him her evening bag to hold. In the dark his fingers soon closed on her thigh. Then she pushed in the cigarette lighter and he guessed what she would do with it when the coil was hot, so he stopped, he let her be. You didn’t mention such incidents to the man you were with. It was anyway commonplace stuff to a man who thought world politics continually.

In the accounts heard by Ms. Wong (who had so much American sensitivity, despite her air of Oriental distance and the Chinese cut of her clothes), Clara’s frankness may have made her seem foreign. Clara went beyond the conventions of American openness. The emerald ring appeased her for a time, but Ithiel was not inclined to move forward, and Clara became more difficult. She told him she had decided that they would be buried in the same grave. She said, “I’d rather go into the ground with the man I loved than share a bed with somebody indifferent. Yes, I think we should be in the same coffin. Or two coffins, but the one who dies last will be on the top. Side by side is also possible. Holding hands, if that could be arranged.” Another frequent topic was the sex and the name of their first child. An Old Testament name was what she preferred—Zebulon or Gad or Asher or Naftali. For a girl, Michal, perhaps, or Naomi. He vetoed Michal because she had mocked David for his naked victory dance, and then he refused to take part in such talk at all. He didn’t want to make any happy plans. He was glum with her when she said that there was a lovely country cemetery back in Indiana with big horse chestnuts all around.

When he went off to South America on business, she learned from Etta Wolfenstein that he had taken a Washington secretary with him for assistance and (knowing Teddy) everything else. To show him what was what, Clara had an affair with a young Jean-Claude just over from Paris, and within a week he was sharing her apartment. He was very good-looking, but he seldom washed. His dirt was so ingrained that she couldn’t get him clean in the shower stall. She had to take a room at the Plaza to force him into the tub. Then for a while she could bear the smell of him. He appealed to her to help get a work permit, and she took him to Steinsalz, Ithiel’s lawyer. Later Jean-Claude refused to return her house key, and she had to go to Steinsalz again. “Have your lock changed, dear girl,” said Steinsalz, and he asked whether she wanted Ithiel billed for these consultations. He was a friend and admired Ithiel.

“But Ithiel told me you never charged him for your services.”

Clara had discovered how amused New Yorkers were by her ignorance.

“Since you took up with this Frenchie, have you missed anything around the house?”

She seemed slow to understand, but that was simply a put-on. She had locked the emerald ring in her deposit box (this, too, an act suggestive of burial).

She said firmly, “Jean-Claude is no bum.”

Steinsalz liked Clara too, for her passionate character. Somehow he knew, also, that her family had money—a realestate fortune, and this gained her a certain consideration with him. Jean-Claude was not the Steinsalz type. He advised Clara to patch up her differences with Ithiel. “Not to use sex for spite,” he said. Clara could not help but look at the lawyer’s lap, where because he was obese his sex organ was outlined by the pressure of his fat. It made her think of one of those objects that appeared when art lovers on their knees made rubbings on a church floor. The figure of a knight dead for centuries.

“Then why can’t Ithiel stay faithful?”

Steinsalz’s first name was Bobby. He was a great economist. He ran a million-dollar practice, and it cost him not a cent. He sublet a corner office space from a flashy accountant and paid him in legal advice.

Steinsalz said, “Teddy is a genius. If he didn’t prefer to hang loose, he could name his position in Washington. He values his freedom, so that when he wanted to visit Mr. Leakey in the Olduvai Gorge, he just picked up and went. He thinks no more about going to Iran than I do about Coney Island. The shah likes to talk to him. He sent for him once just to be briefed on Kissinger. I tell you this, Clara, so that you won’t hold Ithiel on too short a leash. He truly appreciates you, but he irks easy. A little consideration of his needs would fill him with gratitude. A good idea is not to get too clamorous around him. Let me tell you, there are curators in the zoo who give more thought to the needs of a fruit bat than any of us give our fellowman.”

Clara answered him, “There are animals who come in pairs. So suppose the female pines?”

That was a good talk, and Clara remembered Steinsalz gratefully.

“Everybody knows how to advise lovers,” said Steinsalz. “But only the lovers can say what’s what.”

A bookish bachelor, he lived with his eighty-year-old mother, who had to be taken to the toilet in her wheelchair. He liked to list the famous men he had gone to high school with—Holz the philosopher, Buchman the Nobel physicist, Lashover the crystallographer. “And yours truly, whose appellate briefs have made legal history.”