Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [119]
“Are you working at all?” said Denise.
“Not too much.”
“Just playing paddle ball with Langobardi, relaxing with the Mafia? I know you aren’t seeing any of your serious friends on the Midway. Durnwald would give you what-for but he’s in Scotland. Too bad. I know he doesn’t like Fat-Tits much more than I do. And he told me once how he disapproved of your buddy Thaxter, and your being involved in The Ark. You’ve spent a barrel of money probably on that magazine, and where is the first issue? Nessuno sa.” Denise was an opera lover and she took a season ticket at the Lyric and quoted often from Mozart or from Verdi. Nessuno sa was from Cosi Fan Tutte. Where does one find the fidelity of women, sings Mozart’s worldly wiseman—dove sia? dove sia? Nes-su-no sa! Again she was referring to the curious delinquency of Renata, and I knew it perfectly well.
“As a matter of fact, I’m expecting Thaxter. Maybe today.”
“Sure, he’ll blow into town like the entire cast of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. You’d rather foot his bills than give the money to your children.”
“My children have plenty of money. You have the house and hundreds of thousands. You got all the Trench money, you and the lawyers.”
“I can’t keep that barn going. The fourteen-foot ceilings. You haven’t seen the fuel bills. But then again you could squander your money on worse people than Thaxter, and you do. Thaxter at least has some style. He took us to Wimbledon in plenty of style. Remember? With a hamper. With champagne and smoked salmon from Harrods. From what I understand, it was the CIA that was picking up his tab in those days. Why not get the CIA to pay for The Ark?”
“Why the CIA?”
“I read your prospectus. I thought this was just the kind of serious intellectual magazine the CIA could use abroad for propaganda. You imagine you’re some kind of cultural statesman.”
“All I wanted to say in the prospectus was that America didn’t have to fight scarcity and we all felt guilty before people who still had to struggle for bread and freedom in the old way, the old basic questions. We weren’t starving, we weren’t bugged by the police, locked up in madhouses for our ideas, arrested, deported, slave laborers sent to die in concentration camps. We were spared the holocausts and nights of terror. With our advantages we should be formulating the new basic questions for mankind. But instead we sleep. Just sleep and sleep, and eat and play and fuss and sleep again.”
“When you get solemn you’re a riot, Charlie. And now you’re going in for mysticism, as well as keeping that fat broad, as well as becoming an athlete, as well as dressing like a dude—all symptoms of mental and physical decline. I’m so sorry, really. Not just because I’m the mother of your children, but because you once had brains and talent. You might have stayed productive if the Kennedys had lived. Their kind of action kept you responsible and sane.”
“You sound like the late Humboldt. He was going to be Czar of Culture under Stevenson.”
“The old Humboldt hang-up, too. You’ve still got that. He was the last serious friend you had,” she said.
In these conversations, always somewhat dreamlike, Denise believed that she was concerned, solicitous, even loving. The fact that she had gone into judge’s chambers and dug another legal pit for me was irrelevant. In her view we were like England and France, dear enemies. For her it was a special relationship, permitting intelligent exchanges.
“People tell me about this Dr. Scheldt, your