Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [163]
“I didn’t actually think there was. But how wonderful it would be for Louie to go with you on safari. It isn’t that I buy King Solomon’s Mines or anything like that. And before you go, let me suggest something, Charlie. Don’t wear yourself out proving something with these giant broads. Remember, your great love was for me, just five feet tall.”
twenty-five
We were accompanied to O’Hare by the gloomy Señora. In the cab she coached Renata in whispers and stayed with us as we checked in, went through skyjacking inspection. At last we took off. Renata told me in the plane not to worry about leaving Chicago. “At last you’re doing something for yourself,” she said. “It’s funny about you. You’re self-absorbed but you don’t know the ABC of selfishness. Think of it this way, without a me, there’s neither thee nor we.” Renata was a perfect whiz at rhymed sayings. Her couplet for Chicago was, “Without O’Hare, it’s sheer despair.” And when I asked her once what she thought of another fascinating woman she said, “Would Paganini pay to hear Paganini play?” I often wished that the London hostess who thought her so gross, such a slob, could have heard her when she got going. When we reached the take-off position and suddenly began to race, tearing from the runway with an adhesive-plaster sound, she said, “So long, Chicago. Charlie, you wanted to do this town some good. Why that bunch of low bastards, they don’t deserve a man like you here. They know fuck-all about quality. A lot of ignorant crooks are in the papers. The good guys are ignored. I only hope when you write your essay on boredom that you’ll let this city have it right in the teeth.”
We tilted backward as the 727 climbed and heard the grinding of the retracted landing gear. The dark wool of clouds and mist came between us and the bungalows, industries, the traffic, and the parks. Lake Michigan gave one glint and became invisible. I said to her, “Renata, it’s sweet of you to stand up for me. The truth is that my attitude toward the USA—and Chicago is just the USA—hasn’t been one hundred percent either. I’ve always hunted for some kind of cultural protection. When I married Denise I thought I had an ally.”
“Because of her college degrees, I suppose.”
“She turned out to be the head of the Fifth Column. But now I can see why this was. Here was this beautiful slender girl.”
“Beautiful?” said Renata. “She’s witchy-looking.”
“This beautiful slender aspiring martial bookish young woman. She told me that her mother once saw her in the bath and gave a cry, ‘You are a golden girl.’ And then her mother burst into tears.”
“I understand the disappointment of such women,” Renata said. “That’s the upper-middle-class Chicago scene, with the driving mothers. What are those daughters supposed to rise to? They can’t all marry Jack Kennedy or Napoleon or Kissinger or write masterpieces or play the harpsichord at Carnegie Hall dressed in gold lamé with a purple backdrop.”
“So Denise would start up in the night and sob and say that she was nothing.”
“Were you supposed to make her something?”
“Well, there was an ingredient missing.”
“You never found it,” said Renata.
“No, and she went back to the faith of her fathers.”
“Who were the fathers?”
“A bunch of ward-heelers and tough guys. But I’m bound to say that I didn’t have to be such a sensitive plant. After all, Chicago is my own turf. I should have been able to take it.”
“She cried in the night about her wasted life and that was what did it. You’ve got to have your sleep. You could never forgive a woman who kept you awake with her conflicts.”
“I’m thinking about sensitive plants in Business America because we’re headed for New York to find out about Humboldt’s will.”
“A complete waste of time.”
“And I ask myself, Must Philistinism hurt so much?”
“I talk to you,