Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [111]
“If we’re only having a drink, how do you know it’ll get as far as the room?”
“That’s up to you. The bartender will be holding the room key. Slip him five bucks and he’ll hand over the envelope.”
“In what name will the envelope be?”
“Not the stainless name of Citrine, hey?”
“What about Crawley as a name.”
“Our old Latin teacher. Old Crawley! Est avis in dextra mclior quam quattuor extra.”
So the next day Renata and I went to have a drink in the dark bar below street level. I promised myself that this would be absolutely my last idiocy. To myself I put it all as intelligently as possible: that we couldn’t evade History, and that this was what History was doing to everybody. History had decreed that men and women had to become acquainted in these embraces. I was going to find out whether or not Renata was really my Fate, whether the true Jungian anima was in her. She might turn out to be something far different. But one sexual touch would teach me that, for women had peculiar effects on me, and if they didn’t make me ecstatic they made me ill. There were no two ways about it.
On this wet gloomy day the Wabash El was dripping but Renata redeemed the weather. She wore a plastic raincoat divided into red, white, and black bands, a Rothko design. In this gleamy hard-surfaced coat she sat fully buttoned in the dark booth. A broad, bent-brim hat was part of the costume. The banana-fragrant lipstick of her beautiful mouth matched the Rothko red. Her remarks made little sense but then she spoke little. She laughed considerably and quickly turned extremely pale. A candle in a round-bottomed glass wrapped in a fishnet kind of thing gave a small quantity of light. Presently her face settled low on the hard buckling glamorous plastic of her coat and became very round. I couldn’t believe that the kind of broad described by Szathmar—so ready for action, so experienced, would down four martinis and that her face would grow so white, whiter than the moon when seen at 3 p.m. I wondered at first whether she might not be feigning timidity out of courtesy to a man of an older generation, but a cold gin moisture came out on her beautiful face and she appeared to be appealing to me to do something. In all this so far there was an element of déjà vu, for after all I had been through this more than once. What was different now was that I felt sympathetic and even protective toward this young woman in her unexpected weakness. I thought I understood simply enough why I was in the black and subcellar bar. Conditions were very tough. One couldn’t make it without love. Why not? I was unable to budge this belief. It had perhaps the great weight of stupidity in it. This need for love (in such a generalized state) was an awful drag. If it should ever become publicly known that I whispered “My Fate!” as elevator doors were opening the Legion of Honor might justifiably ask to have its medal back. And the most constructive interpretation I could find at the time was the Platonic one that Eros was using my desires to lead me from the awful spot I was in toward wisdom. That was nice, it had class, but I don’t think it was a bit true (for one thing there was not perhaps all that , much Eros left). The big name if I must have one, if any supernatural powers troubled themselves about me, was not Eros, it was probably Ahriman, the principal potentate of darkness. Be that as it might, it was time to get Renata out of this joint.
I went to the bar and leaned over discreetly. I interposed myself among the drinkers. On any ordinary day I would have described these people as barflies and lushes but now their eyes all seemed to me as big as portholes and shed a moral light. The bartender came over. Between the knuckles of my left hand was folded a five-dollar bill. Szathmar had told me exactly how to do this. I asked the bartender whether there was an envelope in the name of Crawley. Immediately he took the five