Сол Беллоу - Dangling Man

The gas stove in the kitchen, which was now our only source of heat, began to give us headaches. We lived with Myron for a week, the three of us in one bed. I caught Mr. Gesell at last, when he was airing the dog. He joked about the cold, and said I was so strapping I could bear it. He pounded my arms playfully, exciting the dog, from whom I shrank. Gesell said. "You'll do. You're pretty husky for a guy that leads such a soft life. Even though you couldn't stand up a day in my line." He was a strongly built man, about forty years old. He dressed in old trousers and flannel shirts. His wife wore the same costumc jeans, shirt, and neckcloth. He began to relate how near the two of them had come to freezing, during the depression, in a bare studio on Lake Park Avenue. They burned orange crates while waiting for the Relief to deliver coal. They took down the curtains and stuffed them in cracks against the wind. "The depression's over," I said.

He laughed so hard he had to take hold of my arm to keep himself up. "

"Say, you're all fight, you are." The dog, with rueful red eyes, watched the snow wreathing back and forth over the street. "We'll see what we can do about you," said Gesell.

A little heat began to seep up, but the house was not really warm. Iva hit upon the plan of holding up the rent. On the fifth of the month, Gesell made belligerent representations. Ira retorted angrily. She didn't expect an artist to make a good landlord. "But you, Mr. Gesell!"

"An artist!" I snorted, thinking of that poor sand hog with his nose and thick legs. Gesell probably carried this back to Beth Gesell, for she stopped speaking to me. There were hard feelings.

But in February things took a turn for the better. In our encounters, as we went in and out of the house, we began to greet one another once more. The rent was paid, the heat rose, the hot water returned. I entered one day, with a check, to find the Gesells having breakfast at a table you might expect to find in a log cabin. The Dalmatian came and rubbed himself against me embarrassingly-poor animal, he was an adjunct and had no life of his own. Gesell took the check with thanks and began to write. ou a receipt. Beth, resting her chin on the back of her hand, was looking out of the window, watching the snow. She was a fat woman, with red hair cut in square, boxlike, masculine fashion. I began to think she was still angry and did not want to speak to me, but she was watching the fall of soft, heavy flakes, and all at once she said: "When we were kids in Montana, we used to say they were plucking geese in heaven. I wonder if they still say that."

"I never heard it before," I said, entirely willing to make peace.

"Maybe the saying's gone out. It was long ago."

"Couldn't be so long," I said generously, and won a saddened smile.

"Oh, yes, long enough."

Gesell wroteon, also smiling, thinking, perhaps, of his wife's girlhood or of similar myths of his own early days.

The yawning dog closed his jaws with a snap.

"Then there was rain," said Beth. "I know," said Gesell. "Angels?"

"Oh, get along, Peter." She laughed, and the color from her hair seemed to spread along her cheeks. "Placer mining."

"I never heard of that, either," I said.

"And here you are," said Gesell, ttuttering the receipt. We were smiling broadly, all three.

Not long afterward, however, on a Sunday afternoon, the house began to go cold, and at two o'clock the electricity was shut off. It was a mild day; we might easily have borne the chill. But we had been listening to a Brahms concerto. I hurried downstairs and rang at Gesell's door. The Dalmatian threw himself in a rage against it, clawing the glass. I ran around to the basement entrance and, without knocking, went in. Gesell stood at his workbench, a length of pipe in his hand.

A pistol would not have deterred me. I strode toward him, kicking rods, board-ends, pieces of wire, out of my way.

"Why did you turn off the current?" I said.

"I had to work on this stoker, that's why."

"Why the devil do you wait until Sunday?

And why couldn't you tall us beforehand?"

"I don't have to get your permission to work on this stoker," he said.

"How long are you going to keep it off?"

Ignoring this question, he turned sullenly back to his bench.

"Well, how long?" I repeated. And, when I saw that he was not going to reply, I took him by the shoulder and, forcing him round, pushed aside the pipe and struck him. He fell, the pipe clattering under him on the cement. But instantly he was up again, brandishing his fists, shouting, "If that's what you want!" He could not reach me. I carried him to the wall, hitting repeatedly into his chest and belly and cutting my knuckles on his open, panting mouth. After the first few blows, my anger vanished. In weariness and self-disgust I pinned him against the bricks. Hearing his thick, rasping shouts, I said pacifyingly, "Don't get excitedMR. Gesell. I'm sorry about this. Don't get excited!"

"You damned fool!" he cried. "You'll get yours! You damned crazy fool!" His voice quivered with terror and anger. "Beth, Be-eth I You wait I" Twisting him away from the wall, I shoved him from me. "I'll get out a warrant.

Be-eth!"

"You'd better not," I said. But I felt the emptiness of my threat and, more ashamed than ever, I went upstairs where I bandaged my hand and sat down to wait for the police. Ira laughed at my fears and said I would have a long wait. She was right, though I was prepared all week to go to court and pay a fine for disorderly conduct. Iva guessed that Beth was unwilling to invest in a warrant. We moved a month later.

Iva and Beth made all the arrangements. we forfeited several weeks' rent to make our escape.

This was "not like" me; it was an early symptom. The old Joseph was inclined to be even-tempered. Of course, I have known for a long time that we have inherited a mad fear of being slighted or scorned, an exacerbated "honor." It is not quite the duelist's madness of a hundred years ago. But we are. a people of tantrums, nevertheless; a word exchangedin a movie or in some other crowd, and we are ready to fly at one another.. Only, in my opinion, our rages are deceptive; we are too ignorant and spiritually poor to know that we fall on the "enemy" from confused motives of love and loneliness. Perhaps, also, self-con-tempt. But for the most part, loneliness.

Iva, though she concealed it at the time, was surprised; she later told me so. This was a rebellion against my own principle. It alarmed me; and the treasons I saw at the Servatius party were partly mine, as I was forced at the time to acknowledge.

February" 8

Tar: thermometer still wavers around zero. The cold is part of the generalmalignancy. I think of its fitness, as the war news comes in. You are bound to respect such a winter for its umnitigated wintriness. "I tax not you, you elementsWith unkindness," Lear yells. He invites their "horrible pleasure." He is quite right, too.

February 9

3I FEEL I am a sort of human grenade whose pin has been withdrawn. I know I am going to explode and I am con147 timtally anticipating the time, with a prayerful despair crying "Boom!" but always prematurely. f The sensein which Goethe was right: Continued life means expectation, lggeath is the abolition of choice. The more choice is limited, the closer we are to death. The greatest cruelty is to curtail expectations without taking away life completely.

A life term in prison is like that. So is citizenship in some countries. The best solution would be to live as if the ordinary expectations had not been removed, not from day to day, blindly. But that requires immense self-mastery.

February I0

S'Eta., has been here twice in the past week. He seems to find me congenial. Which means, I venture to say, that he assumes we are in the. same boat. I would not mind the visits nor the assumption if it were not for the fact that I still feel, at the end of a few hours, that we are practicing some terrible vica together. We smoke and talk. He tells me about his adventures on the Coast, in the hospital, and about his present affairs. I have learned that he receives ten dollars a week from his mother and five more from his brother. Budgeting himself strictly, he manages to live on twelve, and the rest he spends on horses. Occasionally he wins, but he" estimates that he has lost four or five thousand dollars in the last ten years.