Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [19]
I had really bought this Mercedes 280-SL because of my friend Renata. When she saw the Dodge compact I was driving when we met she said, “What kind of car is this for a famous man? There’s some kind of mistake.” I tried to explain to her that I was too susceptible to the influence of things and people to drive an eighteen-thotisand-dollar automobile. You had to live up to such a grand machine, and consequently you were not yourself at the wheel. But Renata dismissed this. She said that I didn’t know how to spend money, that I neglected myself, and that I shirked the potentialities of my success and was afraid of it. She was an interior decorator by trade, and style or panache came natural to her. Suddenly I got the idea. I went into what I called an Antony and Cleopatra mood. Let Rome in Tiber melt. Let the world know that such a mutual pair could wheel through Chicago in a silver Mercedes, the engines ticking like wizard-made toy millipedes and subtler than a Swiss Accutron—no, an Audemars Piguet with jeweled Peruvian butterfly wings! In other words, I had allowed the car to become an extension of my own self (on the folly and vanity side), so that an attack on it was an attack on myself. It was a moment terribly fertile in reactions.
How could such a thing happen on a public street? The noise must have been louder than rivet guns. Of course the lessons of jungle guerrilla tactics were being applied in all the great cities of the world. Bombs were exploding in Milan and London. Still, mine is a relatively quiet Chicago neighborhood. I was parked around the corner from my high-rise, in a narrow side street. But wouldn’t the doorman have heard such clattering in the middle of the night? No, people generally hide under the covers when there are disturbances. Hearing pistol shots they say, “Backfire,” to one another. As for the night-man he locks up at 1 a.m. and washes the floors. He changes in the cellar into a gray denim suit saturated with sweat. Entering the lobby late you smell the combined odors of soap powder and the musk of his denims (like rotting pears). No, the criminals who battered my car would have had no problems with the doorman. Nor with the police. As soon as the squad car had passed, knowing that it wouldn’t return for fifteen minutes, they had jumped out of hiding and fallen on my car with bats, clubs, or hammers.
I knew perfectly well who was responsible for this. I had been warned over and over again. Late at night the phone often rang. Stumbling toward consciousness I picked it up and even before I could bring it to my ear I already heard my caller yelling, “Citrine! You! Citrine!”
“Yes? Yes, this is Citrine. Yes?”
“You son of a bitch. Pay me. Look what you’re doing to me.”
“Doing to you?”
“To me! Fucking-A-right. The check you stopped was to me. Make good, Citrine. Make that lousy check good. Don’t force me to do something.”
“I was fast asleep—”
“I’m not sleeping, why should you be?”
“I’m trying to wake up, Mr.—”
“No names! All we have to talk about is a stopped check. No names! Four hundred and fifty bucks. That’s our only subject.”
These gangster threats in the night against me—me! of all people! a peculiar soul and, in my own mind, almost comically innocent—made me laugh. My way of laughing has often been criticized. Well-disposed people are amused by it. Others can be offended.
“Don’t laugh,” said my night caller. “Knock it off. That’s not a normal sound. Anyhow, who the hell do you think you’re laughing at? Listen, Citrine, you lost the dough to me in a poker game. You’ll say it was just a family evening, or you were drunk, but that’s a lot of crap. I took your check, and I won’t hold still for a slap in the face.”
“You know why I stopped