Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

She said, “If you’d like me to stay over, Wilder has gone to Minnesota to see some peewee politician who needs a set of speeches. Gina is entertaining a few friends at the house.”

Do I look as if I needed friendly first aid?” You are down. What’s the disgrace in that?”

Ithiel drove her to the airport. For the moment the parkways were empty. Ahead were airport lights, and in the slanting planes seated travelers by the thousands came in, went up.

Clara asked what job he was doing. “Not who you’re doing it for, but the subject.”

He said he was making a survey of the opinions of émigrés on the new Soviet regime—he seemed glad to change the subject, although he had always been a bit reluctant to talk politics to her. Politics were not her thing, he didn’t like to waste words on uncomprehending idle questioners, but he seemed to have his emotional reasons tonight for saying just what it was that he was up to. “Some of the smartest emigres are saying that the Russians didn’t announce liberalization until they had crushed the dissidents. Then they co-opted the dissidents’ ideas. After you’ve gotten rid of your enemies, you’re ready to abolish capital punishment—that’s how Alexander Zinoviev puts it. And it wasn’t only the KGB that destroyed the dissident movement but the whole party organization, and the party was supported by the Soviet people. They strangled the opposition, and now they’re pretending to be it. You have the Soviet leaders themselves criticizing Soviet society. When it has to be done, they take over. And the West is thrilled by all the reforms.”

“So we’re going to be bamboozled again,” said Clara.

But there were other matters, more pressing, to discuss on the way to the airport. Plenty of time. Ithiel drove very slowly. The next shuttle flight wouldn’t be taking off until nine o’clock. Clara was glad they didn’t have to rush.

“You don’t mind my wearing this ring tonight?” said Clara.

“Because this is a bad time to remind me of the way it might have gone with us? No. You came down to see how I was and what you could do for me.”

“Next time, Ithiel, if there is a next time, you’ll let me check the woman out. You may be big in political analysis… No need to finish that sentence. Besides, my own judgment hasn’t been one hundred percent.”

“If anybody were to ask me, Clara, I’d say that you were a strange case—a woman who hasn’t been corrupted, who has developed a moral logic of her own, worked it out independently by her own solar power and from her own feminine premises. You hear I’ve had a calamity and you come down on the next shuttle. And how few people take this Washington flight for a human purpose. Most everybody comes on business. Some to see the sights, a few because of the pictures at the National Gallery, a good percentage to get laid. How many come because they’re deep?”

He parked his car so that he could walk with her to the gate.

“You’re a dear man,” she said. “We have to look out for each other.”

On the plane, she pulled her seat belt tight in order to control her feelings, and she opened a copy of Vogue, but only to keep her face in it. No magazine now had anything to tell her.

When she got back to Park Avenue, the superintendent’s wife, a Latino lady, was waiting. Mrs. Peralta was there too. Clara had asked the cleaning lady to help Gina entertain (to keep an eye on) her friends. The elevator operator-doorman was with the ladies, a small group under the marquee. The sidewalks of Park Avenue are twice as broad as any others, and the median strip was nicely planted with flowers of the season. When the doorman helped Clara from the yellow cab, the women immediately began to tell her about the huge bash Gina had given. “A real mix of people,” said Mrs. Peralta.

“And the girls?”

“Oh, we were careful with them, kept them away from those East Harlem types. We’re here because Mr. Regler called to say what flight you’d be on.”

“I asked him to do that,” said Clara.

“I don’t think Gina thought so many were coming. Friends, and friends of friends, of her boyfriend, I guess.”

“Boyfriend? Now, who would he be? This is news to me.”

“I asked Marta Elvia to come and see for herself,” said Antonia Peralta. Marta Elvia, the super’s wife, was related somehow to Antonia.

They were taken up in the elevator. Marta Elvia, eight months pregnant and filling up much of the space, was saying what a grungy mob had turned up. It was an open house.

“But tell me, quickly, who is the boyfriend?” said Clara.

The man was described as coming from the West Indies; he was French-speaking, dark-skinned, very good-looking, “arrogant-like,” said Mrs. Peralta.

“And how long has he been coming to the house?”

“Couple of weeks, just.”

When she entered the living room, Clara’s first impression was: So this is what can be done here. It doesn’t have to be the use I put it to. She had limited the drawing room to polite behavior.

The party was mostly over; there were only four or five couples left. As Clara described it, the young women looked gaudy. “The room was more like a car of the West Side subway. Lots of muscle on the boys, as if they did aerobics. And I used to be able to identify the smell of pot, but I’m in the dark, totally, on the new drugs. Crack is completely beyond me; I can’t even say what it is, much less describe how it works and does it have a smell. The whole scene was like a milage to me, how they were haberdashed. Gina’s special friend, Frederic, was a good-looking boy, black, and he did have an attractive French accent. Gina tried to behave as if nothing at all was wrong, and she couldn’t quite swing that. I wasn’t going to fuss at her, though. At the back of the apartment, I had three children sleeping. At a time like this your history books come back to you—how a pioneer woman dealt with an Indian war party when her husband was away. So I put myself out to make time pass pleasantly, toned down the music, ventilated the smoke, and soon the party petered out.”

While Mrs. Peralta was cleaning up, Clara had a talk with Gina Wegman. She said she had imagined a smaller gathering—a few acquaintances, not a random sample of the street population.

“Frederic asked if he could bring some friends.”

Well, Clara was willing to believe that this was simply a European misconception of partying in New York—carefree musical young people, racially mixed, dancing to reggae music. In Vienna, as elsewhere, such pictures of American life were on TV—America as the place where you let yourself go.

“Anyway, I must tell you, Gina, that I can’t allow this kind of thing—like scenes from some lewd dance movie.”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Velde.”

“Where did you meet Frederic?”

“Through friends from Austria. They work at the UN.”

“Is that where he works too?”

“I never asked.”

“And do you see a lot of him? You don’t have to answer—I can tell you’re taken with him. You never asked what he does? He’s not a student?”

“It never came up.”

Clara thought, judging by Gina’s looks, that what came up was Gina’s skirt. Clara herself knew all too well how that was. We’ve been through it. What can be more natural in a foreign place than to accept exotic experiences? Otherwise why leave home at all?

Clifford, a convict in Attica, still sent Clara a Christmas card without fail. She hadn’t seen him in twenty-five years. They had no other connection. Frederic, to go by appearances, wouldn’t even have sent a card. Generational differences. Clifford had been a country boy.

We must see to it that it doesn’t end badly, was what Clara told herself. But then we must learn what sort of person Gina is, really, she thought. What makes her tick, and if this is the whole sum of what she wants. I didn’t take her for a little hot-pants type.