Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [107]
These were some of the notes that Thaxter wanted me to expand. I was however in too unstable a condition. Several times a week I went downtown to see my lawyers and discuss my problems. They told me how complex my predicament was. Their news was worse and worse. I soared in elevators looking for salvation in female form whenever a door opened. A person in my condition should lock himself in his room, and if he hasn’t the strength of character to take Pascal’s advice to stay put he ought to throw the key out of the window. Then the door rolled open in the county building and I saw Renata Koffritz. She too wore a numbered steel badge. We were both taxpayers, voters, citizens. But oh, what citizens! And where was the voice that said, “My Fate!”? It was silent. Was she, then, it? She certainly was all woman, soft and beautifully heavy in a miniskirt and nursery-school shoes fastened with a single strap. I thought, God help me. I thought, Better think twice about this. I even thought, At your age a Buddhist would already be thinking of disappearing forever into the forest. But it was no use. She may not have been the Fate I was looking for but she was nevertheless a Fate. She even knew my name. “You must be Mr. Citrine,” she said.
The year before I had been given an award by the Zig-Zag Club, a Chicago cultural society of bank executives and stockbrokers. I was not invited to become a member. I did however receive a plaque for the book I wrote about Harry Hopkins and my picture was in the Daily News. Perhaps the lady had seen it there. But she said, “Your friend Mr. Szathmar is my divorce lawyer and he thought we should get to know each other.”
Ah, she had me. How quickly she informed me that she was being divorced. Those love-pious eyes were already sending messages of love and depravity to the Chicago-boy sector of my soul. A gust of the old West Side sex malaria came over me.
“Mr. Szathmar is devoted to you. He adores you. He practically closes his eyes and looks poetic when he discusses you. And he’s such a stout man, you don’t expect it. He told me about your love who crashed in the jungle. And also about your first romance—with the doctor’s daughter.”
“Naomi Lutz.”
“That’s a crazy name.”
“Yes, it is, isn’t it.”
It was true that my boyhood friend Szathmar loved me but he loved matchmaking or procuring also. He had a passion for arranging affairs. This was useful to him professionally, as it tied many clients to him. In special cases he took over all the practical details for them—the rent of a mistress’s apartment, her car, and her charge accounts, her dental bills. He even covered suicide attempts. Even funerals. Not the law but fixing people up was his real calling. And we two boyhood pals were going to continue lustful to the end, if he had his way. He made this decorous. He did it all with philosophy, poetry, ideology. He quoted, he played records, and he theorized about women. He tried to keep up with the rapidly changing erotic slang of successive generations. So were we to end our lives as cunt-struck doddering wooers left over from