Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [22]
Denise signaled me to come into the kitchen. She said, “I won’t have this.” She was warlike and shrill. Her voice was clear, thrilling, and minutely articulate—the rising arpeggios of hysteria.
“Oh, come on. Denise, he can hear you.” I lowered my voice and said, “Let George have some of this chili con carne.”
“There’s not enough. It’s just half a pound of hamburger. But that’s not the point. The point is I won’t serve him.”
I laughed. Partly from embarrassment. I am normally a low baritone, almost basso profundo, but under certain kinds of provocation my voice disappears into the higher registers, perhaps into the bat range.
“Listen to that screeching,” said Denise. “You give yourself away when you laugh like this. You were born in a coal scuttle. Brought up in a parrot-house.”
Her great violet eyes were unyielding.
“All right,” I said. I took George to the Pump Room. We ate shashlik brought in flaming by turbaned Moors.
“I don’t want to interfere in your marriage, but I notice you’ve stopped breathing,” said George.
George feels that he can speak for Nature. Nature, instinct, heart guide him. He is biocentric. To see him rub his large muscles, his Roman Ben Hur chest and arms with olive oil is a lesson in piety toward the organism. Concluding, he takes a long swig from the bottle. Olive oil is the sun and the ancient Mediterranean. Nothing is better for the bowels, the hair, the skin. He holds his own body in numinous esteem. He is a priest to the inside of his nose, his eyeballs, his feet. “You’re not getting enough air with that woman. You look as if you’re suffocating. Your tissues aren’t getting any oxygen. She’ll give you cancer.”
“Oh,” I said. “She may think she’s offering me the blessings of an American marriage. Real Americans are supposed to suffer with their wives, and wives with husbands. Like Mr. and Mrs. Abraham Lincoln. It’s the classic US grief, and a child of immigrants like me ought to be grateful. For à Jew it’s a step up.”
Yes, Denise would be overjoyed to hear of this atrocity. She had seen Renata speeding past in the silver Mercedes. “And you, the passenger,” said Denise, “getting to be as bald as a barber pole, even if you comb your side-hair over to hide it, and grinning. She’ll give you something to grin about, that fat broad.” From insult Denise went into prophecy. “Your mental life is going to dry out. You’re sacrificing it to your erotic needs (if that’s the term for what you have). After sex, what can you two talk about. . . ? Well, you wrote a few books, you wrote a famous play, and even that was half ghosted. You associated with people like Von Humboldt Fleisher. You took it into your head that you were some kind of artist. We know better, don’t we. And what you really want is to get rid of everybody, to tune out and be a law unto yourself. Just you and your misunderstood heart, Charlie. You couldn’t bear a serious relationship, that’s why you got rid of me and the children. Now you’ve got this tramp with the fat figure who wears no bra and shows her big nipples to the world. You’ve got ignorant kikes and hoodlums around you. You’re crazy with your own brand of pride and snobbery. There’s nobody good enough for you. ... I could have helped you. Now it’s too late!”
I would not argue with Denise. I felt a certain sympathy with her. She said I was living badly. I agreed. She thought I wasn’t all there, and I would have had to be completely crazy to deny it. She said I was writing stuff that made sense to no one. Maybe so. My last book, Some Americans, subtitled The Sense of Being in the USA, was quickly remaindered. The publishers had begged me not to print it. They offered to forget a debt