The Collected Stories Of Saul Bellow (63 page)

Oh, as for bleakness. Examining her, he established that “bleak” was a different thing for him. Nor did he mean low spirits when he said “depleted.” He wasn’t low, he was higher than he liked, very high, in danger of being disconnected. He was superlucid, which he always wanted to be, but this lucidity had its price: clear ideas becoming ever more clear the more the ground opened under your feet—illumination increasing together with your physiological progress toward death. I never expected to live forever, but neither did I expect
this.
_ And there was no saying what
this
_ was, precisely. It was both definite and cloudy. And here Katrina gave him support, materially. Katrina, a lady with a full body, sat on her swelling bottom line. She wore a knitted dark-green costume. She had strong legs in black boots. Where the ostrich quills once grew, the surface of the leather was bubbled. Very plain to him in her figure were the great physical forces of the human trunk and the weight of the backswell, the separation of the thighs. The composure of her posture had a whore effect on him—did she know this or not? Was she aware that her neatness made him horny? He kept it from her, so that she had no idea of the attraction of her hands, especially the knuckle folds and the tips of what he called, to himself only, her touch-cock fingers. Katrina was his manifest Eros, this worried, comical lady for whom he had such complex emotions, for the sake of which he put up with so many idiocies, struggled with so many irritations. She could irritate him to the point of heartbreak, so that he asked was it worth it, and why didn’t he spin off this stupid cunt; and couldn’t he spend his old age better, or had his stars run out of influence altogether? He used to be able to take his business where he liked. That pagan availability was closing out. At first, she had been his lump of love. He counted the stages. At first, just fun. The next stage was laughable, as he recognized through her that his erotic epoch might after all be the Victorian, with its special doodads. Then there seemed to be a kind of Baudelairean phase,
… tu connais la caresse Qui fait revivre les morts…
_

Only he didn’t in fact buy that. His wasn’t an example of clinically disturbed sexuality. He felt detached from all such fancy stuff. She
did
_ in fact have the touch that brought back the dead—his dead. But there was no witchery or sadic darkness about it. Evidently, whether he liked it or not, his was a common sexual type. He was beyond feeling the disgrace of its commonness. She kept him going, and he had to confess that he wouldn’t know what to do at all if he didn’t keep going. Therefore he went flying around. He was not ready to succumb. He paid no more attention to death than to a litter of puppies pulling at the cuffs of his pants.

About bleak winter, he was saying to Katrina, “I have trouble staying warm. I’ve heard that capsicum helps. For the capillaries. Last night was bad. I put my feet in hot water. I had to wear double socks and still was cold.”

“I can take care ofthat.”

Wonderful, what powers women will claim.

“And Vanessa, this morning—what was she like?”

“Well,” he said, “what these kids really want is to make you obey the same powers that
they
_ have to serve. The older generation, it happens, cooperates with them. The Cuban mother was puzzled. I could read it in her eyes—‘What in hell are you people
up
_ to?’ “

“Oh, you met her.”

“You bet I did. This morning I was sitting in her kitchen, and the boy was our interpreter. The kid’s IQ must be out of sight. The woman says she has nothing against Vanessa. Nessa has made herself part of the family. She’s moved in on them. She peels potatoes and washes pots. She and the boy don’t go to restaurants and movies because he has no money and won’t let her pay. So they study day and night, and they’re both on the dean’s list. But my daughter is just meddling. She abducted the genius of the family who was supposed to be the salvation of his siblings and his mama.”

“But she says she loves him, and looks at you with those long eyes she inherited from you.”

“She’s a little bitch. I found out that she was giving her mother sex advice. How a modern wife can please a husband better. And you have to find new ways to humor an old man. She told Beila all about some homosexual encyclopedia. She said not to buy it, but gave her the address of a shop where she could read some passages on foreplay.”

Katrina saw nothing funny in this. She was stabbed with anger. “Were you approached? That way?”

“By Beila? Everybody would have to go mad altogether.”

No, not Beila. You had only to think about it to see how impossible it would be. Beila carried herself with the pride of the presiding woman, the wife. Her rights were maintained with Native American dignity. She was a gloomy person. (Victor had made her gloomy—one could understand that.) She was like the wife of a Cherokee chieftain, or again Catherine of Aragon. There was something of each type of woman in the gaudy-gloomy costumes she designed for herself. Tremendous, her silent air of self-respect. For such a proud person to experiment along lines suggested by a gay handbook was out of the question, totally. Still, Katrina felt the hurt of it. Disrespect. Ill will. It was disrespectful also of Beila. Beila was long-suffering. At heart, Beila was a generous woman. Katrina really did know the score.

“So there’s the new generation,” said Victor. “When you consider the facts, they seem sometimes to add up to an argument for abortion. My youngest child! The wildest of all three. Now she’s abandoned her plan to be a rabbi and she looks more Jewish than ever, with those twists of hair beside her ears.”

Curious how impersonal Victor could be. Categories like wife, parent, child never could affect his judgment. He could discuss a daughter like any other subject submitted to his concentrated, radiant consideration—with the same generalizing detachment. It wasn’t unkindness. It wasn’t ordinary egotism. Katrina didn’t have the word for it.

Anyway, they were together in the lounge, and to have him to herself was one of her best pleasures. He was always being identified on New York streets, buttonholed by readers, bugged by painters (and there were millions of people who painted), but here in this sequestered corner Katrina did not expect to be molested. She was wrong. A man appeared; he entered obviously looking for someone. That someone could only be Victor. She gave a warning signal—lift of the head—and Victor cautiously turned and then said in a low voice, somewhat morose, “It’s him—I mean the character who wrote me the note.”

“Oh-oh.”

“He’s a determined little guy…. That’s quite a fur coat he’s wearing. It must have been designed by F. A. O. Schwarz.” It seemed to sweeten his temper to have said this. He smiled a little.

“That
_is an expensive garment,” said Katrina.

It was a showy thing, beautifully made but worn carelessly. In circles of fur, something like the Michelin tire circles, it reached almost to the floor. Larry Wrangel was slight, slender, his bald head was unusually long. The grizzled side hair, unbrushed, looked as if he had slept on it when it was damp. A long soiled white scarf, heavy silk, drooped over the fur. Under the scarf a Woolworth’s red bandanna was knotted. The white fur must have been his travel coat. For it wouldn’t have been of any use in Southern California. His tanned face was lean, the skin stretched—perhaps a face-lift? Katrina speculated. His scalp was spotted with California freckles. The dark eyebrows were nicely arched. His mouth was thin, shy and also astute.

Victor said as they were shaking hands, “I couldn’t get back to you last night.”

“I didn’t really expect it.”

Wrangel pulled over one of the Swedish-modern chairs and sat forward in his rolls of white fur. Not removing the coat was perhaps his way of dealing with the difference in their sizes—bulk against height.

He said, “I guessed you would be surrounded, and also bushed by late evening. Considering the weather, you had a good crowd.”

Wrangel did not ignore women. As he spoke he inspected Katrina. He might have been trying to determine why Victor should have taken up with this one. Whole graduating classes of girls on the make used to pursue Victor.

Katrina quickly reconciled herself to Wrangel—a little, smart man, not snooty with her, no enemy. He was eager only to have a talk, long anticipated, a serious first-class talk. Victor, unwell, feeling damaged, was certainly thinking how to get rid of the man.

Wrangel was chatting rapidly, wanting to strike the right offering while avoiding loss of time. His next move was to try the Cedar Bar and the Artists’

Club on Eighth Street. He spoke of Baziotes and of Arshile Gorky, of Gorky’s loft on Union Square. He recalled that Gorky couldn’t get Walt Whitman’s name straight and that he spoke of him as “Vooterman.” He mentioned Parker Tyler, and Tyler’s book on Pavel Tchelitchew, naming also Edith Sitwell, who had been in love with Tchelitchew (Wulpy grimaced at Edith Sitwell and said, “Tinkle poems, like harness bells”). Wrangel laughed, betraying much tension in his laughter. Shyness and shrewdness made him seem to squint and even to jeer. He wished to become expansive, to make himself agreeable. But he didn’t have the knack for this. An expert in pleasing Victor, Katrina could have told him where he was going wrong. Victor’s attitude was one of angry restraint and thinly dissimulated impatience. Trina felt that he was being too severe. This Wrangel fellow should be given half a chance. He was being put down too hard because he was a celebrity.

On closer inspection, the white furs which should have been immaculate were spotted by food and drink; nor was there any reason (he was so rich!) why the silk scarf should be so soiled. She took a liking to Wrangel, though, because he made a point of including her in the conversation. If he mentioned a name like Chiaromonte or Barrett, he would say, aside, “A top intellectual in that circle,” or, “The fellow who introduced Americans to German phenomenology.”

But Victor wouldn’t have any of this nostalgia, and he said, “What are you doing in Buffalo anyway? This is a hell of a season to leave California.”

“I have a screwy kind of motive,” said Wrangel. “Clinical psychologists, you see, often send me suggestions for films, inspired by the fantasies of crazy patients. So once a year I make a swing of selected funny farms. And here in Buffalo I saw some young fellows who were computer bugs—now institutionalized.”

“That’s a new wrinkle,” said Victor. “I would have thought that you didn’t need to leave California, then.”

“The maddest mad are on the Coast? Do you think so?”

“Well, not now, maybe,” Victor said. Then he made one of his characteristic statements: “It takes a serious political life to keep reality real. So there are sections of the country where brain softening is accelerated. And Southern California from the first has been set up for the maximum exploitation of whatever goes wrong with the American mind. They farm the kinks as much as they do lettuces and oranges.”

“Yes, I suppose so,” said Wrangel.

“As for the part played by intellectuals… Well, I suppose in this respect there’s not much difference between California and Massachusetts. They’re in the act together with everybody else. I mean intellectuals. Impossible for them to hold out. Besides, they’re so badly educated they can’t even identify the evils. Even Vespasian when he collected his toilet tax had to justify himself:
Pecunia non olet.
_ But we’ve come to a point where it’s
only
_ money that doesn’t stink.”

“True, intellectuals are in shameful shape….”

Katrina observed that Wrangel’s eyes were iodine-colored. There was an iodine tinge even to the whites.

“The main money people despise the intelligentsia, I mean especially the fellows that bring the entertainment industry suggestions for deepening the general catalepsy. Or the hysteria.”

Wrangel took this meekly enough. He seemed to have thought it all through for himself and then passed on to further considerations. “The banks, of course…” he said. “It can take about twenty million bucks to make one of these big pictures, and they need a profit in the neighborhood of three hundred percent. But as for money, I can remember when Jackson Pollock was driving at top speed in and out of the trees at East Hampton while loving up a girl in his jeep. He wouldn’t have been on welfare and food stamps, if he had lived. He played with girls, with art, with death, and wound up with dollars. What do those drip canvases fetch now?” Wrangel said this in a tone so moderate that he got away with it. “Sure, the investment golems think of me as a gold mine, and they detest me. I detest them right back, in spades.” He said to Katrina, “Did you hear Victor’s lecture last night? It was the first time in forty years that I actually found myself taking notes like a student.”

Katrina couldn’t quite decide what opinion Victor was forming of this Wrangel. When he’d had enough, he would get up and go. No boring end-men would ever trap him in the middle. As yet there was no sign that he was about to brush the man off. She was glad of that; she found Wrangel entertaining, and she was as discreet as could be in working the band of her watch forward on her wrist. Tactful, she drew back her sleeve to see the time. Very soon now the kids would be having their snack. Silent Pearl, wordless Soolie. She had failed to get a rise out of them with the elephant story. A lively response would have helped her to finish it. But you simply couldn’t get them to react. Not even Lieutenant Krieggstein with his display of guns impressed them. Krieggstein may have confused them when he pulled up his trousers and showed the holster strapped to his stout short leg. Then, too, he sometimes wore his wig and sometimes not. That also might have been confusing.

Victor had decided to give Wrangel a hearing. If this proved to be a waste of time, he would start forward, assemble his limbs, take his stick upside down like a polo mallet, and set off, as silent as Pearl, as wordless as Soolie. Since he loved conversation, his cutting out would be a dreadful judgment on the man. “You gave me a lot to think about during the night,” said Wrangel. “Your comments on the nonrevolution of Louis Napoleon and his rabble of deadbeats, and especially the application of that to the present moment—what you called the proletarianized present.” He took out a small notebook, which Trina identified as a Gucci product, and read out one of his notes. ” ‘Proletarianization: people deprived of everything that formerly defined humanity to itself as human.’ “