Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

“Tell me! I can see why General Haig and such people call on you to analyze the Iranians or the Russians. By the way, Wilder thought you were great on TV with Dobrynin, week before last.”

When Ithiel smiled, his teeth were so good you suspected Hollywood dentistry, but they were all his own.

“Dobrynin has some genius, of a low kind. He convinces Americans that Russians are exactly like them. Sometimes he behaves as if he were the senior senator from a fifty-first, ail-Russian state. Just a slight accent, but the guys from the Deep South have one also. He sold Gorbachev on this completely, and Gorbachev is selling the whole U. S. A. Which craves to be sold. Deceived, if you prefer.”

“Like me, in a way, about the Human Pair.”

“You’re close to that girl, I see.”

“Very close. It would be easy for you to put her down as a well-brought-up kid with a taste for low sex. Resembling me. You’d be wrong. Too bad you can’t see her yourself. Your opinion would interest me.”

“So she isn’t like you?”

“I sure hope not.” Clara made a gesture, as if saying, Wipe out these Helmsley Palace surroundings and listen to me. “Don’t forget my two suicide attempts. I have a spoonful of something wild in my mixture, my whole sense of…”

“Of life…”

“Listen to me. You have no idea really how wild and how mixed, or how much territory it takes in. The territory stretches over into death. When I’m drunk with agitation—and it is like being drunk—there’s one pulse in me that’s a death-beat pulse, and it tempts me to make out with death. It says, Why wait! When I get as intense as that, existence won’t hold me. That’s the internal horror side of the thing. I’m open to seduction by death. Now you’re going to remind me that I’m the mother of three kids.”

“Exactly what I was about to do.”

“There’s no one in the world but you that I’d say this to. You’re the one human being I fully confide in. Neither do you have secrets from me. Whatever you didn’t admit I saw for myself.”

“You certainly did, Clara.”

“But we’ll never be man and wife. Oh, you don’t have to say anything. You love me, but the rest is counterindicated. It’s one of those damn paradoxes that have to be waited out. There may even be a parallel to it in your field, in politics. We have the power to destroy ourselves, and maybe the desire, and we keep ourselves in permanent suspense—waiting. Isn’t that wild, too? You could tell me. You’re the expert. You’re going to write the book of books about it.”

“Now you’re making fun of me.”

“Not really, Ithiel. If it is the book of books on the subject, it should be written. You may be the man to write it, and I’m not making fun. For me it would be funny. Think of a great odalisque, nude and beautiful. And now think of her in eyeglasses and writing books on a lap board.”

Over the table they smiled briefly at each other.

‘But I want to get back to Gina,” said Clara. “You’re going to find me a dependable investigator to check out Frederic, and the rest of it. I doubt that she is like me, except in taking chances. But when I told her that the ring was given by a man who loved me, the fact registered completely. What I didn’t add was that I bullied you into giving it to me. Don’t deny it. I twisted your arm. Then I sentimentalized it. Then I figured out that you continued to love me because we didn’t marry. And now the ring… The girl understands about the ring. The love part of it.”

Teddy was stirred, and looked aside. He wasn’t ready, and perhaps never would be ready, to go further. No, they never would be man and wife. When they stood up to go, they kissed like friends.

“You’ll get me an investigator with a little class… the minimum sleaze?”

“I’ll tell the man to go to your office, so you can look him over.”

“A few things have to be done for you too,” said Clara. “That Francine left you in bad shape. You have that somber look that you get when you’re up against it.”

“Is that what you mean by the Mennonite?”

“There were plenty of Mennonites in Indiana—I can tell that you didn’t have any business in New York today except me.”

Within ten days she had Gina’s address—a fourth-floor walk-up on East 128th Street, care of F. Vigneron. She had a phone number as well. Call? No, she wouldn’t speak to her yet. She brought her executive judgment to bear on this, and the advice from this source was to send a note. In her note, she wrote that the children asked for Gina often. Lucy missed her. Even so, she had done Lucy good. You could see the improvements. There was a lot of woman in that small girl, already visible. Then, speaking for herself, she said that she was sorry to have come down so hard on a matter that needn’t be spelled out now. She had left Gina few options. She had had no choice but to go. The mystery was why she had gone “uptown” when other choices were possible. However, Gina owed her no explanations. And Clara hoped that she would not feel that she had to turn away from her forever or decide that she, Clara, was an enemy. Anything but a hostile judge, Clara respected her sense of honor.

Asked for a reference on her unlisted mental line, Clara, when reached, would have said about Gina: soft face, soft bust, brown bourgeois-maiden gaze, but firm at decision time. Absolutely ten on a scale often.

But in the note she sent to Gina she went on, ladylike, matronly and fair-minded, to wish her well, and concluded, “You should have had some notice, and I believe it only fair that the month should have been rounded out, so since I am not absolutely certain of the correct address, I will leave an envelope with Marta Elvia. Two hundred dollars in cash.”

Frederic Vigneron would send her for the money, if he got wind of it.

Gottschalk, the private eye, did his job responsibly; that was about the best that could be said of him. Perhaps half an eye. And not much more ear. Still, he did obtain the facts she asked for. He said of the building in East Harlem, “Of course the city can’t run around and condemn every joint it should, or there’d be lots more street people sleeping in the West Side Terminal. But I wouldn’t want any nieces of mine living there.”

Having done what you could, you went ahead with your life: showered and powdered with talcum in the morning, put on underthings and stockings, chose a skirt and blouse for the day, made up your face for the office, took in the paper, and, if Wilder was sleeping in (he did often), ground your coffee and as the water dripped turned the pages of the Times professionally. For a group of magazines owned by a publishing corporation, she was the lady overseeing women’s matters. Almost too influential to have a personal life, as she sometimes observed to Ms. Wong. High enough in the power structure, you can be excused from having one, “an option lots of people are glad to exercise.”

Nobody called for the money envelope. Marta Elvia’s instructions were to give it to Gina only. After a period of keen interest, Clara stopped asking about it. Gottschalk, doing little, sent an occasional memo: “Status quo unchanged.” To go with his Latin, Clara figured that Gina had found a modus vivendi with her young Haitian. The weeks, week after week, subdued Clara. You can say that you’re waiting only if there is something definite to wait for. During this time it often seemed there wasn’t anything. And, “I never feel so bad as when the life I lead stops being characteristic—when it could be anybody else’s life,” she told Laura Wong.

But coming home one afternoon after a session with Dr. Gladstone (things were so bad that she was seeing him regularly again), she entered her bedroom for an hour’s rest before the kids returned from ballet class. She had dropped her shoes and was crawling toward the pillows, her mouth open in the blindness of fatigue, surrendering to the worst of feelings, when she saw that her ring had been placed on the night table. It had been set on a handkerchief, a new object from a good shop. She slipped on her ring and lunged for the phone across the bed, rapidly punching out Marta Elvia’s number.