The Collected Stories Of Saul Bellow (31 page)

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 She had withdrawn from all that.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.

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 щmigrщs 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.

“I suppose things are done differently in Vienna,” Clara said. “As to bringing strangers into the house…”