Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [161]
“Never mind many Americans,” said Naomi. How comfortable she looked in slippers, smiling in the kitchen, her fat arms crossed. I kept repeating that it would have been bliss to sleep with her for forty years, that it would have defeated death, and so on. But could I really have borne it? The fact was that I became more and more fastidious as I grew older. So now I was honor-bound to face the touchy question: could I really have embraced this faded Naomi and loved her to the end? She really didn’t look good. She had been beaten about by biological storms (the mineral body is worn out by the developing spirit). But this was a challenge that I could have met. Yes, I could have done it. Yes, it would have worked. Molecule for molecule she was still Naomi. Each cell of those stout arms was still a Naomi cell. The charm of those short teeth still went to my heart. Her drawl was as effective as ever. The Spirits of Personality had done a real job on her. For me the Anima, as C. G. Jung called it, was still there. The counterpart soul, the missing half described by Aristophanes in the Symposium.
“So you’re going away to Europe with that young broad?” she said.
I was astonished. “Who told you that?”
“I ran into George Swiebel.”
“I wish George wouldn’t tell my plans to everyone.”
“Oh, come, we’ve all known each other a lifetime.”
“These things get back to Denise.”
“You think you have secrets from that woman? She could see through a wall of steel, and you’re no wall of steel. She doesn’t have to figure you, anyway, she only has to figure out what the young lady wants you to do. Why are you going twice a year to Europe with this broad?”
“She’s got to find her father. Her mother isn’t certain which of two men . . . And last spring I had to be in London on business. So we stopped in Paris, too.”
“You must be right at home, over there. The French made you a knight. I kept the clipping.”
“I’m the cheapest type of low-grade chevalier.”
“And did it tickle your vanity to travel with a great big beautiful doll? How did she make out with your high-class European friends?”
“Do you know that Woodrow Wilson sang ‘Oh You Beautiful Doll’ on the honeymoon train with Edith Boiling? The Pullman porter saw him dancing and singing in the morning when he came out.”
“That’s just the sort of fact you’d know.”
“And he was just about our most dignified President,” I added. “No, Renata wasn’t a big hit with women abroad. I took her to a fancy dinner in London and the hostess thought her terribly vulgar. It wasn’t the beige lace see-through dress. Nor even her wonderful coloring, her measurements, her vital emanations. She was just Sugar Ray Robinson among the paraplegics. She turned on the Chancellor of the Exchequer. He compared her to a woman in the Prado, by one of the Spanish masters. But the ladies were rough on her and she cried afterward and said it was because we weren’t married.”
“So next day you bought her thousands of dollars’ worth of gorgeous clothes instead, I bet. But be you what you may, I get a big kick out of seeing you. You’re a sweet fellow. This visit is a wonderful treat for a poor plain old broad. But would you humor me about one thing?”
“Sure, Naomi, if I can.”
“I was in love with you, but I married a regular kind of Chicago person because I never really knew what you were talking about. However, I was only eighteen. I’ve often asked myself, now that I’m fifty-three, whether you’d make more sense today. Would you talk to me the way you talk to one of your intelligent friends—better yet, the way you talk to yourself? Did you have an important thought yesterday, for instance?”
“I thought about sloth, about how slothful I’ve been.”
“Ridiculous. You’ve worked hard. I know you have,