Сол Беллоу - Dangling Man

I saw my socks appear beside the slip. She was standing before me, holding out a towel. "Dry yourself. Do you want to catch pneumonia?" As I lowered myself to the chair, her hand passed over my head and grasped the chain of the lamp, yanking it rudely. I could hear it in the darkness, beating against the shell of the bulb. I waited for the sound to subsideThen reached upward. She intercepted my fingers. "It would only be putting it off, Joey," she said. Withdraw100 ing my hand, I hurriedly began to undress.

She groped her way around the chair and sat on the bed. "I knew you'd see it my way sooner or later."

"Darling!"

I "saw it her way" for two months, or until she began hinting at my leaving Iva. She claimed that Iva did not treat me well and that we were not suited to each other. I had never given her cause to think so, but she said she could tell. I have no real appetite for guile; the strain of living in both camps was too much. And I was unlike myself. I was out of character. It did not take me long to see that at the root of it all was my unwillingness to miss anything.

A compact with one woman puts beyond reach what others might give us to enjoy; the soft blondes and the dark, aphrodisiacal women of our imaginations are set aside. Shall we leave life not knowing them? Must we?

Avidity again. As soon as I recognized it, I began to bring the affair with Kitty to a dose. It died in the course of a long conversation, in which I made it clear that a man must accept limits and cannot give in to the wild desire to be everything and everyone and everything to everyone. She was disappointed but also pleased by my earnestness, the tone I took, and felt honored to have her mind, her superior nature, thus addressed. We agreed that I was to continue visiting her on a friendly basis. There was nothing wrong in that, was there? Why not be sensible? She liked me, liked listening to me; she had already learned a great deal.

Did she understand, I asked, that my motives had nothing to do with her, personally? In many ways I was reluctant @. @. I… was not the kind who could keep too many irons in the fire, she finished for me good-naturedly.

It was a great relief. But the matter was not ended.

I felt obliged to visit her, at first, as though to assure her that I valued her as much as ever. Had she thought my interest in her was at an end, she would have been deeply offended. But my visits were not long obligatory and one-sided, forwiththe onset of the dangling days it was a positive relief to drop in now and then to smoke a few cigarettes and drink a glass of rum. I was comfortable with Kitty.

The missing book reminded me that I had not seen her for some weeks, and I thought I would spend the rest of the evening with her and avoid bickering with Iva and going to sleep in raw temper.

The transom over Kitty's door appeared dark, but the room was not unoccupied. I heard her voice before I knocked. There was a brief silence.

I took off my glove and knocked again.

Kitty's transom has been lacquered over because, from the staircase, one can easily peer into her apartment. It was not easy to tell, therefore, whether the lights were out. And even if they were, it was still possible that she might be in the adjoining room, the kitchen. But at my third knock light suddenly shone through the scratches and uneven brush strokes in the transom. I could hear her conferring with someone, and then the knob turned and Kitty appeared, tying the cord of her dressing gown. She was not, of course, delighted to see me and I, too, was somewhat put out. I said that I was passing by and had decided to drop in for my book. She did not ask me in, though I mentioned with inappropriate irony that my feet were wet.

"I ah, can't look for it now. The place is such a mess. Suppose you stop by again tomorrow?"

"I don't know whether I can tomorrow," I replied. "Busy?"

It was her turn to look ironical. She began to relish the situation and, her arm casually stretched across the door, smiled at me and now did not seem at all displeased at having been found out.

"Are you working?".

"NO @?

"Then what keeps you busy?"

"Oh, something's come up. I can't come. But I have to have the book. It isn't mine, you see @?

"It's Iva's?"

I nodded. Glancing into the room, I caught sight of a man's shirt hanging on the back of a chair. Had I edged over a few inches, I know I would have seen a man's arm on the coverlet. The room was always kept overheated and, through the haze, the thick, comfortable yet stirring scent I had come to associate with her was diffused It reached me here in the hall, arousing nostalgia and envy in me, and I could not resist feeling that, like a fool, I had irrevocably thrown away the comfort and pleasure she had offered me in an existence barren of both. She looked behind, and then turned to me with a smile, but half in contempt, as much as to say, "It isn't my fault that that isn't your shirt hanging on the chair."

I said angrily: "When can I get it?"

"The book?"

"It's important that I get it back," I said. "Can't you locate it now? I'll wait."

She seemed surprised. "I'm afraid not.

Suppose I mail it tomorrow, will that be all right?"

"It'll have to be, from the looks of it."

"Well, good night then, Joseph." She closed the door. I stood looking up at the transom. The streaks of light flashed out. It was left a tarnished dull brown. I started down the stairs, breathing the staleness of cabbage and bacon and of the dust sifting behind the wallpaper. As I approached the second floor, I saw in the apartment below, through the open bar of the doorway, a woman in a slip, sitting before the mirror with a razor, her arm crooked backward, a cigarette on the ledge of the radio beside her, and from it two, curling prongs of smoke rising. The sight of her held me momentarily; then, possibly because the sound of my steps had ceased, or sensing that she was being watched, she looked up, startled-a broad, angry face. I hurried down the remaining stairs into the vestibule, with its ageless, nameless, rooming-house hangings, its plush chairs, high, varnished, sliding doors, and, on the grained oak board, the brass nipples of call bells. From various parts of the house there were sounds: of splashing and frying, of voices raised in argument or lowered in appeasement or persuasion, singing popular, songs: lgginner in the diner Nothing could be finer Chattanooga choochoo '@. of chiming telephones, of the janitor's booming radio one floor below. On a pedestal a bronze LaocoOn held in his suffering hands a huge, barbarically furred headpiece of a lampshade with fringes of blackened lace. Buttoning my gloves, I passed into the outer hall, thinking, as I did so, that by this time Kitty had slipped back into bed and that she and her companion had (i sought a way to say it) fallen together again, his appetite increased by the in. trusion. And, while I could objectively find no reason why she should not do as she pleased, I found myself neverthelessambiguously resentful and insulted.

Fog and rain had gone, abolished by a high wind, and, in place of that imagined swamp where death waited in the thickened water, his lizard jaws open, there was a clean path of street and thrashing trees. Through the clouds the wind had sunk a hole in which a few stars dipped. I ran to the corner, jumping over puddles. A streetcar was in sight, crashing forward, rocking on its trucks from side to side and nicking sparks from the waving cable. I caught it while it was in motion and stood on the platform, panting; the conductor was saying that it was bad business to flip a car in the wet, you wanted to be careful about such tricks. We were swept off with quaking windows, blinking through floods of air, the noise of the gong drowning under the horn of the wind.