Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [193]
“No,” said Renata. “I know the answer to that one.”
“It’s rather our minds that have allowed themselves to be convinced that there is no imaginative power to connect every individual to the creation independently.”
It occurred to me suddenly that Thaxter in his home-on-the-range outfit might as well have been in church and that I was behaving like his minister. This was not a Sunday, but I was in my Palm Court pulpit. As for Renata, smiling—her dark eyes, red mouth, white teeth, smooth throat—though she interrupted and heckled during these sermons she got a kick out of the way I delivered them. I knew her theory well. Whatever was said, whatever was done, either increased or diminished erotic satisfaction, and this was her practical test for any idea. Did it produce a bigger bang? “We could have been at the Scala tonight,” she said, “and part of a brilliant audience hearing Rossini. Instead, do you know what we were doing today, Thaxter? We went out to Coney Island so Charlie could collect his inheritance from his dear dead old pal Humboldt Fleisher. It’s been Humboldt, Humboldt, Humboldt, like ‘Figaro, Figaro.’ Humboldt’s eighty-year-old uncle gave Charlie a bunch of papers, and Charlie read ‘em and wept. Well, for a month now I’ve heard nothing but Humboldt and death and sleep and metaphysics and how the poet is the arbiter of the diverse and Walt Whitman and Emerson and Plato and the World Historical Individual. Charlie is like Lydia the Tattooed Lady, covered with information. You remember that song, ‘You Can Learn a Lot from Lydia’?”
“Could I see those papers?” said Thaxter.
“Come with me to Italy tomorrow,” said Renata to me.
“Darling, I’ll join you there in a few days.”
The Palm Court Trio, returning, began to play Sigmund Romberg, and Renata said, “Why, it’s four o’clock. I don’t want to miss Deep Throat. It starts at four-twenty.”
“Yes, and I’ve got to go to the dock,” said Thaxter. “You are coming, aren’t you, Charlie?”
“I hope to. I’ve got to wait here for Kathleen.”
“I’ve written out my itinerary for the dictators,” said Thaxter, “so you can get in touch if you have a mind to go to Madrid and start our project. Say the word, and I’ll begin organizing. I know people are giving you the business in Chicago. I’m sure you’ll be needing lots of money. . . .” He glanced at Renata, who was organizing herself to leave. “And there’s real dough in my proposal.”
“I’ve got to run,” said Renata. “I’ll see you back here later.” She slung the bag over her shoulder and preceded Thaxter across the vast luxurious carpet, part of the Christmas display, a blast of gold within the bristling green, and through the swinging doors.
thirty
In her large bag Renata carried off my shoe. I realized this when I looked under the table for it. Gone! She had taken it. By means of this prank she told me how she felt about going to the movies alone while I visited sentimentally with an old friend, recently widowed and possibly available. I couldn’t go upstairs now, Kathleen would arrive any minute, so I sat waiting, feeling the chill in one foot while the music played. Renata in high spirits had symbolic reasons for pinching my loafer; I was hers. Was she correspondingly mine? When she was proprietary I became uneasy. I felt that as soon as she was sure of one man she became free to contemplate her future with another. And I? Evidently I longed most to possess most the woman that threatened me most.
“Ah, Kathleen, I’m glad to see you,” I said as Kathleen came up. I rose, my peculiar foot missing its peculiar shoe. She kissed me—an old friend’s warm kiss on the cheek. The Nevada sun hadn’t given her an outdoor color. Her fair hair was lighter from the admixture of gray. She hadn’t grown stout but she was fleshier, a big woman. This was only the normal effect of the decades, a slackening and softening and a saddening of the cheeks, an attractive melancholy or hollowing. She had once had pale freckles. Now her face had larger spots. Her upper