Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [116]
“Is Gumballs Schwirner still carrying on with Charlie’s wife?” said Srole, “I thought he just got married.”
“So what if he got married? He still hasn’t stopped meeting this crazy broad in motels. She gets strategy ideas from him in the sack, then she bugs Pinsker with them. They’re confusing the hell out of Pinsker. How I’d love to get that Schwirner.”
I offered no comment and scarcely seemed to hear what they were saying. Tomchek wanted me to suggest that we hire a private investigator to get the goods on Schwirner. I recalled Von Humboldt Fleisher and Scaccia, the private eye. I was having no part of this. “I expect you guys to restrain Pinsker,” I said. “Don’t let him tear at my guts.”
“What, in chambers? He’ll behave himself. He rags you on the witness stand but in conference it’s different.”
“He’s an animal,” I said.
They answered nothing.
“He’s a beast, a cannibal.”
This made an unpleasant impression. Tomchek and Srole, like Szathmar, were touchy about the profession. Tomchek remained silent. It was for Srole, the associate and stooge, to deal with captious Citrine. Mild, distant, Srole said, “Pinsker is a very tough man. Tough opponent. A gut fighter.”
Okay, they weren’t going to let me knock lawyers. Pinsker belonged to the club. Who, after all, was I? A filmy transient figure, eccentric and snooty. They disliked my style entirely. They hated it. But then why should they like it? Suddenly I saw the thing from their viewpoint. And I was extremely pleased. In fact I was illuminated. Maybe these sudden illuminations of mine were an effect of the metaphysical changes I was undergoing. Under the recent influence of Steiner I seldom thought of death in the horrendous old way. I wasn’t experiencing the suffocating grave or dreading an eternity of boredom, nowadays. Instead I often felt unusually light and swift-paced, as if I were on a weightless bicycle and sprinting through the star world. Occasionally I saw myself with exhilarating objectivity, literally as an object among objects in the physical universe. One day that object would cease to move and when the body collapsed the soul would simply remove itself. So, to speak again of the lawyers, I stood between them, and there we were, three naked egos, three creatures belonging to the lower grade of modern rationality and calculation. In the past the self had had garments, the garments of station, of nobility or inferiority, and each self had its carriage, its looks, wore the sheath appropriate to it. Now there were no sheaths and it was naked self with naked self burning intolerably and causing terror. I saw this now, in a fit of objectivity. It felt ecstatic.
What was I to these fellows anyway? An oddball and a curiosity. To build himself up Szathmar bragged about me, he oversold me, and people became horribly annoyed because he told them to look me up in reference books and read about my prizes and my medals and Zig-Zag awards. He hammered them with this, he said they should be proud to have a client like me so of course they detested me sight unseen. The quintessence of their prejudice was once expressed by Szathmar himself when he lost his temper and shouted, “You’re nothing but a prick with a pen!” He was so sore that he surpassed himself and yelled even louder, “With or without a pen you’re a prick!” But I wasn’t offended. I thought this was a whopping epithet and I laughed. If you only put it right you could say what you liked to me. However, I knew exactly how I made Tomchek and Srole feel. From their side they inspired me with an unusual thought. This was that History had created something new in the USA, namely crookedness with self-respect or duplicity with honor. America had always been very upright and moral, a model to the entire world, so it had put to death the very idea of hypocrisy and was forcing itself to live with this new imperative of sincerity,