Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

Clara said, “I sort of loved old Steinsalz too. He was like a Santa Claus with an empty sack who comes down your chimney to steal everything in the house—that’s one of Ithiel’s wisecracks, about Steinsalz and property. In his own off-the-wall way, Steinsalz was generous.”

Clara took advice from the lawyer and made peace with Ithiel on his return. Then the same mistakes overtook them. “I was a damn recidivist. When Jean-Claude left I was glad of it. Getting into the tub with him at the Plaza was a kind of frolic—a private camp event. They say the Sun King stank. If so, Jean-Claude could have gone straight to the top of Versailles. But my family are cleanliness freaks. Before she would sit in your car, my granny would force you to whisk-broom the seat, under the floor mat too, to make sure her serge wouldn’t pick up any dust.” By the way, Clara locked up the ring not for fear that Jean-Claude would steal it but to protect it from contamination by her wrongful behavior in bed.

But when Ithiel came back, his relations with Clara were not what they had been. Two outside parties had come between them, even though Ithiel seemed indifferent to Jean-Claude. Jealous and hurt, Clara could not forgive the little twit from Washington, of whom Etta Wolfenstein had given her a full picture. That girl was stupid but had very big boobs. When Ithiel talked about his mission to Betancourt in Venezuela, Clara was unimpressed. An American woman in love was far more important than any South American hotshot. “And did you take your little helper along to the president’s palace to show off her chest development?”

Ithiel sensibly said, “Let’s not beat on each other too much,” and Clara repented and agreed. But soon she set up another obstacle course of tests and rules, and asserted herself unreasonably. When Ithiel had his hair cut, Clara said, “That’s not the way I like it, but then I’m not the one you’re pleasing.” She’d say, “You’re grooming yourself more than you used to. I’m sure Jascha Heifetz doesn’t take such care of his hands.” She made mistakes. You didn’t send a man with eyes from Greek mythology to the bathroom to cut his fingernails, even if you did have a horror of clippings on the carpet—she’d forget that she and Ithiel were the Human Pair.

But at the time she couldn’t be sure that Ithiel was thinking as she did about “Human.” To sound him out, she assumed a greater interest in politics and got him to talk about Africa, China, and Russia. What emerged was the insignificance of the personal factor. Clara repeated and tried out words like Kremlin or Lubyanka in her mind (they sounded like the living end) while she heard Ithiel tell of people who couldn’t explain why they were in prison, never rid of lice and bedbugs, never free from dysentery and TB, and finally hallucinating. They make an example of them, she thought, to show that nobody is anybody, everybody is expendable. And even here, when Ithiel was pushed to say it, he admitted that here in the U. S., the status of the individual was weakening and probably in irreversible decline. Felons getting special consideration was a sign of it. He could be remote about such judgments, as if his soul were one of a dozen similar souls in a jury box, hearing evidence: to find us innocent would be nice, but guilty couldn’t shock him much. She concluded that he was in a dangerous moral state and that it was up to her to rescue him from it. The Human Pair was also a rescue operation.

“A terrible crisis threatened to pinch us both to death.”

At the time, she was not advanced enough to think this to a conclusion. Later she would have known how to put it: You couldn’t separate love from being. You could Be, even though you were alone. But in that case, you loved only yourself. If so, everybody else was a phantom, and then world politics was a shadow play. Therefore she, Clara, was the only key to politics that Ithiel was likely to find. Otherwise he might as well stop bothering his head about his grotesque game theories, ideology, treaties, and the rest of it. Why bother to line up so many phantoms?

But this was not a time for things to go well. He missed the point, although it was as big as a boulder to her. They had bad arguments—“It was a mistake not to let him sleep”—and after a few oppressive months, he made plans to leave the country with yet another of his outlandish lady friends.

Clara heard, again from Etta Wolfenstein, that Ithiel was staying in a fleabag hotel in the Forties west of Broadway, where he’d be hard to find. “‘safety in sleaze,’ Etta said—She was a piece of work.” He was to meet the new girlfriend at Kennedy next afternoon.

At once Clara went uptown in a cab and walked into the cramped lobby, dirty tile like a public lavatory. She pressed with both hands on the desk and lied that she was Ithiel s wife, saying that he had sent her to check him out and take his luggage. “They believed me. You’re never so cool as when you’re burned up completely. They didn’t even ask for identification, since I paid cash and tipped everybody five bucks apiece. When I went upstairs I was astonished that he could bring himself to sit down on such a bed, much less sleep in those grungy sheets. The morgue would have been nicer.”

Then she returned to her apartment with his suitcase—the one they took to Cortina, where she had been so happy. She waited until after dark, and he turned up at about seven o’clock. Cool with her, which meant that he was boiling.

“Where do you get off, pulling this on me?”

“You didn’t say you were coming to New York. You were sneaking out of the country.”

“Since when do I have to punch the clock in and out like an employee!”

She stood up to him without fear. In fact she was desperate. She shouted at him the Old Testament names of their unborn children. “You’re betraying Michal and Naomi.”

As a rule, Ithiel was self-possessed to an unusual degree, “unless we were making love. It was cold anger at first,” as Clara was to tell it. “He spoke like a man in a three-piece suit. I reminded him that the destiny of both our races depended on those children. I said they were supposed to be a merger of two high types. I’m not against other types, but they’d be there anyway, and more numerous—I’m no racist.”

“I can’t have you check me out of my hotel and take my suitcase. Nobody is going to supervise me. And I suppose you went through my things.”

“I wouldn’t do that. I was protecting you. You’re making the mistake of your life.”

At that moment Clara’s look was hollow. You saw the bones of her face, especially the orbital ones. The inflammation of her eyes would have shocked Ithiel if he hadn’t been bent on teaching her a lesson. Time to draw the line, was what he was saying to himself.

“You’re not going back to that horrible hotel!” she said when he picked up his bag.

“I have a reservation in another place.”

“Teddy, take off your coat. Don’t go now, I’m in a bad way. I love you with my soul.” She said it again, when the door swung shut after him.

He told himself it would set a bad precedent to let her control him with her fits.

The luxury of the Park Avenue room didn’t sit well with him—the gilded wall fixtures, the striped upholstery, the horror of the fresco painting, the bed turned back like the color photograph in the brochure, with two tablets of chocolate mint on the night table. The bathroom was walled with mirrors, the brightwork shone, and he felt the life going out of him. He went to the bed and sat on the edge but did not lie down. It was not in the cards for him to sleep that night. The phone rang—it was a mean sound, a thin rattle—and Etta said, “Clara has swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills. She called me and I sent the ambulance. You’d better go to Bellevue; you may be needed. Are you alone there?” He went immediately to the hospital, hurrying through gray corridors, stopping to ask directions until he found himself in the waiting space for relatives and friends, by a narrow horizontal window. He saw bodies on stretchers, no one resembling Clara. A young man in a dog collar presently joined him. He said he was Clara’s minister.