Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

Her Chinese American confidante was used to such sudden zooming. Clara was not being stagy when she expressed such ideas about clothing; she was brooding audibly, and very often she had Ithiel Regler in mind, the women he had gone off with, the women he had married. Among them were several “fancy women”—she meant that they were overdressed sexpots, gaudy and dizzy, “ground-dragging titzers,” on whom a man like Ithiel should never have squandered his substance. And he had been married three times and had two children. What a waste! Why should there have been seven marriages, five children! Even Mike Spontini, for all his powers and attractions, had been a waste—a Mediterranean, an Italian husband who came back to his wife when he saw fit, that is, when he was tired of business and of playing around. All the others had been dummy husbands, humanly unserious—you could get no real masculine resonance out of any of them.

What a pity! thought Laura Wong. Teddy Regler should have married Clara. Apply any measure—need, sympathy, feeling, you name it—and the two profiles (that was Laura’s way of putting it) were just about identical. And Ithiel was doing very badly now. Just after Gina became her au pair girl, Clara learned from the Wolfenstein woman, Teddy’s first wife, who had her scouts in Washington, that the third Mrs. Regler had hired a moving van and emptied the house one morning as soon as Teddy left for the office. Coming home in the evening, he found nothing but the bed they had shared the night before (stripped of bedding) and a few insignificant kitchen items. Francine, the third wife, had had no child to take care of. She had spent her days wandering around department stores. That much was true. He didn’t let her feel that she was sharing his life. Yet the man was stunned, wiped out—depressed, then ill. He had been mourning his mother. Francine had made her move a week after his mother’s funeral. One week to the day.

Clara and Laura together had decided that Francine couldn’t bear his grieving. She had no such emotions herself, and she disliked them. “Some people just can’t grasp grief,” was what Clara said. Possibly, too, there was another man in the picture, and it would have been awkward, after an afternoon with this man, to come home to a husband absorbed in dark thoughts or needing consolation. “I can easily picture this from the wife’s side,” said Laura. Her own divorce had been a disagreeable one. Her husband, a man named Odo Fenger, a dermatologist, had been one of those ruddy, blond, fleshy baby-men who have to engross you in their emotions (eyes changing from baby blue to whiskey blue) and so centuple the agonies of breaking away. So why not send a van to the house and move straight into the future—future being interpreted as never (never in this life) meeting the other party again. “That Francine didn’t have it in her to see him through, after the feeling had been killed out of her. Each age has its own way of dealing with these things. As you said before, in the Renaissance you used poison. When the feeling is killed, the other party becomes physically unbearable.”

Clara didn’t entirely attend to what Laura was saying. Her only comment was, “I suppose there has been progress. Better moving than murdering. At least both parties go on living.”

By now Ms. Wong wanted no husbands, no children. She had withdrawn from all that. But she respected Clara Velde. Perhaps her curiosity was even deeper than her respect, and she was most curious about Clara and Ithiel Regler. She collected newspaper clippings about Regler and like Wilder Velde didn’t miss his TV interviews, if she could help it.

When Clara heard about Francine and her moving van, she flew down to Washington as soon as she could get to the shuttle. Gina was there to take charge of the children. Clara never felt so secure as when dependable Gina was looking after them. As a backup Clara had Mrs. Peralta, the cleaning woman, who had also become a family friend.

Clara found Ithiel in a state of sick dignity. He was affectionate with her but reserved about his troubles, thanked her somewhat formally for her visit, and told her that he would rather not go into the history of his relations with Francine.

“Just as you like,” said Clara. “But you haven’t got anybody here; there’s just me in New York. I’ll look after you if you should need it.”

“I’m glad you’ve come. I’ve been despondent. What I’ve learned, though, is that when people get to talking about their private troubles, they go into a winding spiral about relationships, and they absolutely stupefy everybody with boredom. I’m sure that I can turn myself around.”

“Of course. You’re resilient,” said Clara, proud of him. “So we won’t say too much about it. Only, that woman didn’t have to wait until your mother was dead. She might have done it earlier. You don’t wait until a man is down, then dump on him.”

“Shall we have a good dinner? Middle Eastern, Chinese, Italian, or French? I see you’re wearing the emerald.”

“I hoped you’d notice. Now tell me, Ithiel, are you giving up your place? Did she leave it very bare?”

“I can camp there until some money comes in and then refit the living room.”

“There ought to be somebody taking care of you.”

“If there’s one thing I can do without, it’s this picture of poor me, deep in the dumps, and some faithful female who makes my heart swell with gratitude.” Being rigorous with his heart gave him satisfaction.

“He likes to look at the human family as it is,” Clara was to explain.

“You wouldn’t marry a woman who did value you,” said Clara at dinner. “Like Groucho Marx saying he wouldn’t join a club that accepted him for membership.”

“Let me tell you,” said Ithiel, and she understood that he had drawn back to the periphery in order to return to the center from one of his strange angles. “When the president has to go to Walter Reed Hospital for surgery and the papers are full of sketches of his bladder and his prostate—I can remember the horrible drawings of Eisenhower’s ileitis—then I’m glad there are no diagrams of my vitals in the press and the great public isn’t staring at my anus. For the same reason, I’ve always discouraged small talk about my psyche. It’s only fair that Francine shouldn’t have valued me. I would have lived out the rest of my life with her. I was patient….”

“You mean you gave up, you resigned yourself.”

“I was affectionate,” Ithiel insisted.

“You had to fake it. You saw your mistake and were ready to pay for it. She didn’t give a squat for your affection.”

“I was faithful.”

“No, you were licked,” said Clara. “You went to your office hideaway and did your thing about Russia or Iran. Those crazy characters from Libya or Lebanon are some fun to follow. What did she do for fun?”

“I suppose that every morning she had to decide where to go with her credit cards. She liked auctions and furniture shows. She bought an ostrich-skin outfit, complete with boots and purse.”

“What else did she do for fun?”

Ithiel was silent and reserved, moving crumbs back and forth with the blade of his knife. Clara thought, She cheated on him. Precious Francine had no idea what a husband she had. And what did it matter what a woman like that did with her gross organs. Clara didn’t get a rise out of Ithiel with her suggestive question. She might just as well have been talking to one of those Minoans dug up by Evans or Schliemann or whoever, characters like those in the silent films, painted with eye-lengthening makeup. If Clara was from the Middle Ages, Ithiel was from antiquity. Imagine a low-down woman who felt that he didn’t appreciate her! Why, Ithiel could be the Gibbon or the Tacitus of the American Empire. He wouldn’t have thought it, but she remembered to this day how he would speak about Keynes’s sketches of Clemenceau, Lloyd George, and Woodrow Wilson. If he wanted, he could do with Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy, or Kissinger, with the shah or de Gaulle, what Keynes had done with the Allies at Versailles. World figures had found Ithiel worth their while. Sometimes he let slip a comment or a judgment: “Neither the Russians nor the Americans can manage the world. Not capable of organizing the future.” When she came into her own, Clara thought, she’d set up a fund for him so he could write his views.