Henderson the Rain King - Saul Bellow [6]
and not die (one more year like this one in Paris and something in me would have rusted forever), and that something good might even come of me. She loved me. "What have you done with your husband?" I said. On the way back to her hotel, down Boulevard Raspail, she told me, "I thought I should have children. I was getting old." (Lily was then twenty-seven.) "But on the way to the wedding I saw it was a mistake. I tried to get out of the car at a stoplight in my wedding dress, but he caught me and pulled me back. He punched me in the eye," she said, "and it was a good thing I had a veil because the eye turned black, and I cried all the way through the ceremony. Also, my mother is dead." "What! He gave you a shiner?" I said, furious. "If I ever come across him again I will break him in pieces. Say, I'm sorry about your mother." I kissed her on the eyes, and then we arrived at her hotel on the Quai Voltaire and were on top of the world, in each other's arms. A happy week followed; we went everywhere, and Hazard's private detective followed us. Therefore I rented a car and we began a tour of the cathedral towns. And Lily in her marvelous way--always marvelously--began to make me suffer. "You think you can live without me, but you can't," she said, "any more than I can live without you. The sadness just drowns me. Why do you think I left Hazard? Because of the sadness. When he kissed me I felt saddest of all. I felt all alone. And when he--" "That's enough. Don't tell me," I said. "It was better when he punched me in the eye. There was some truth in that. Then I didn't feel like drowning." And I began to drink, harder than ever, and was drunk in every one of the great cathedrals--Amiens, Chartres, V�lay, and so on. She often had to do the driving. The car was a little one (a Deux Cent Deux d�potable or convertible) and the two of us, of grand size, towered out of the seats, fair and dark, beautiful and drunk. Because of me she had come all the way from America, and I wouldn't let her accomplish her mission. Thus we traveled all the way up to Belgium and back again to the Massif, and if you loved France that would have been fine, but I didn't love it. From start to finish Lily had just this one topic, moralizing: one can't live for this but has to live for that; not evil but good; not death but life; not illusion but reality. Lily does not speak clearly; I guess she was taught in boarding school that a lady speaks softly, and consequently she mumbles, and I am hard of hearing on the right side, and the wind and the tires and the little engine also joined their noise. All the same, from the joyous excitement of her great pure white face I knew she was still at it. With lighted face and joyous eyes she persecuted me. I learned she had many negligent and even dirty habits. She forgot to wash her underthings until, drunk as I was, I ordered her to. This may have been because she was such a moralist and thinker, for when I said, "Wash out your things," she began to argue with me. "The pigs on my farm are cleaner than you are," I told her; and this led to a debate. The earth itself is like that, corrupt. Yes, but it transforms itself. "A single individual can't do the nitrogen cycle all by herself," I said to her; and she said, Yes, but did I know what love _could__ do? I yelled at her, "Shut up." It didn't make her angry. She was sorry for me. The tour continued and I was a double captive--one, of the religion and beauty of the churches which I was not too drunk to see, and two, of Lily, and her glowing and mumbling and her embraces. She said a hundred times if she said it once, "Come hack tu the States with nie. I've come to take you back." "No," I said finally. "If there was any heart in you at all you wouldn't torture me, Lily. Damn you, don't forget I'm a Purple Heart veteran. I've served my country. I'm over fifty, and I've had my belly full of trouble." "All the more reason why you should do something now," she said. Finally I told her at Chartres, "If you don't quit it I'm going to blow my brains out." This was cruel of me, as