Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [120]
Denise was pelting me with the ammunition she stored up daily in her mind and heart. Again, however, her information was accurate. Like Renata and the old Señora, Miss Scheldt also spoke of May-December marriages, of the happiness and creativity of Picasso’s declining years, of Casals and Charlie Chaplin and Justice Douglas.
“Renata doesn’t want you to be a mystic, does she?”
“Renata doesn’t meddle that way. I’m not a mystic. Anyway I don’t know why mystic should be such a bad word. It doesn’t mean much more than the word religion, which some people still speak of with respect. What does religion say? It says that there’s something in human beings beyond the body and brain and that we have ways of knowing that go beyond the organism and its senses. I’ve always believed that. My misery comes, maybe, from ignoring my own metaphysical hunches. I’ve been to college so I know the educated answers. Test me on the scientific world-view and I’d score high. But it’s just head stuff.”
“You’re a born crank, Charlie. When you said you were going to write that essay on boredom, I thought, There he goes! Now you’re degenerating quickly, without me. Sometimes I feel you might be certifiable or committable. Why don’t you go back to the Washington-in-the-Sixties book? The stuff you published in magazines was fine. You’ve told me lots more that never got into print. If you’ve lost your notes, I could remind you. I can still straighten you out, Charlie.”
“You think you can?”
“I understand the mistakes we both made. And the way you live is too grotesque—-all these girls, and the athletics and trips, and now the anthroposophy. Your friend Durnwald is upset about you. And I know your brother Julius is worried. Look, Charlie, why don’t you marry me again? For starters we could stop the legal fight. We should become reunited.”
“Is this a serious proposition?”
“It’s what the girls want more than anything. Think it over. You’re not exactly leading a life of joy. You’re in bad shape. I’d be taking a risk.” She stood up and opened her purse. “Here are a few letters that came to the old address.”
I looked at the postmarks. “They’re months old. You might have turned them over before, Denise.”
“What’s the difference? You get too much mail as it is. You don’t answer most of it, and what good does it do you?”
“You’ve opened this one and resealed it. It’s from Humboldt’s widow.”
“Kathleen? They were divorced years before he died. Anyway, here comes your legal talent.”
Tomchek and Srole entered the courtroom, and from the other side came Cannibal Pinsker in a bright yellow double-knit jazzy suit and a large yellow cravat that lay on his shirt like a cheese omelette, and tan shoes in two tones. His head was brutally hairy. He was grizzled and he carried himself like an old prizefighter. What might he have been in an earlier incarnation, I wondered. I wondered about us all.
twenty-two
We were not meeting with Denise and Pinsker after all, only with the judge. Tomchek, Srole, and I entered his chambers. Judge Urbanovich, a Croatian, perhaps a Serbian, was plump and bald, a fatty, and somewhat flat-faced. But he was cordial, he was very civilized. He offered us a cup of coffee. I referred his cordiality to the Department of Vigilance. “No, thanks,” I said.
“We’ve now had five sessions in court,” Urbanovich began. “This litigation is harmful to the parties—not to their lawyers, of course. Being on the stand is frightful for a sensitive creative person like Mr. Citrine. . . .” The judge meant me to feel the ironic weight of this. Sensitivity in a mature Chicagoan, if genuine, was a treatable form of pathology, but a man whose income passed two hundred thousand dollars in his peak years was putting you on about sensitivity. Sensitive plants didn’t make that kind of