Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [198]
“That’s right. I have two such sealed envelopes.”
“Two?”
“Yes,” I said. “The other is the one we’d dreamed up at Princeton. Now I know how Humboldt was amusing himself in that rotten hotel. He spent his time working all this out in meticulous detail and with ceremonious formalities. That was right up his alley.”
“Listen, Charles, we must go fifty-fifty,” Kathleen said.
“Bless you, commercially it’s zero,” I told her.
“On the contrary,” Kathleen said firmly. I looked again at her, hearing this. It was out of character for Kathleen, normally diffident, to be so positively contradictory. “I submitted this to people in the business and I actually signed a contract and took an option payment of three thousand dollars. Half of that is yours.”
“You mean that someone has actually paid out money for this?”
“I had two offers to choose from. I accepted the one from Steinhals Productions. Where shall I send your check?”
“At the moment I have no address. I’m in transit. But no, Kathleen, I won’t take any of this money.” I was thinking how I would give this news to Renata. She had ridiculed Humboldt’s gift so brilliantly, and on behalf of our vanishing generation, Humboldt’s and mine, I had felt hurt. “And is a script being written?”
“It’s receiving serious consideration,” said Kathleen. Occasionally her voice soared into a girlish treble. It broke.
“How interesting. How goofy. A solid mass of improbabilities,” I said. “Although I’ve always been a little proud of my personal oddities, I’ve begun to suspect that they may be only faint images of a thousand real and much more powerful oddities out there, somewhere—that they may not be so personal after all and that maybe this is a general condition. That’s why Humboldt’s burlesque of love and ambition and all the rest of those monkey-shines can sound plausible to business people.”
“I had good legal advice and my contract with Steinhals is for a minimum of thirty thousand dollars if the option is picked up. We could go over seventy thousand, depending on the budget. We should know in about two months. End of February. And what I feel now, Charlie, is that as joint owners you and I should draw a separate contract.”
“Now, Kathleen, let’s not add to the unreality of things. No contracts. And I don’t need this money.”
“I would have thought so too, before today, with everybody talking about your million-dollar fortune. But before you signed the check at the Palm Court you added it twice from top to bottom and again from the bottom. You lost your color. And then I saw you struggling to decide on a tip. Now don’t be embarrassed, Charles.”
“No, no, Kathleen. I’ve got plenty. It’s only one of my Depression hang-ups. Besides, what a rip-off! It makes old-timers indignant.”
“But I know you’re being sued. I know what happens when the judges and lawyers get after a man. I haven’t run a Nevada dude ranch for nothing.”
“Hanging on to money is hard, of course. It’s like clutching an ice cube. And you can’t just make it and then live easy. There’s no such thing. That’s what Humboldt probably didn’t understand. I wonder, did he think money made the difference between success and failure? Then he didn’t understand. When you get money you go through a metamorphosis. And you have to contend with terrific powers inside and out. There’s almost nothing personal in success. Success is always money’s own success.”
“You’re merely trying to change the subject. You’ve always been a great observer. For years I’ve watched you looking at people cannily. As if you saw them but they didn’t see you. But come now, Charlie, you aren’t the only observer.”
“Would I be staying at the Plaza if I were going broke?”
“With a young lady you might, yes.”
This large, altered but still handsome woman with the occasionally breaking piercing voice, her cheeks looped inward with attractive melancholy, had been studying me. Her glance, though still a bit averted and oblique from the long habit of passivity, was warm and kindly. I am quickly and deeply touched when people take the