Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [221]
I don’t know who the other gentlemen in the Ritz may have been dining with, the human scene was too pregnant and dense in complications for me at this moment, and all I can say was that I was glad the aims of the pimping old bitch across the table were merely conventional aims. If she had gone after my soul, what was left of it, I would have been sunk. But all she wanted was to market her daughter at her finest hour. And was I through? And was it over? For a few years I had had it good with Renata—the champagne cocktails, the table set with orchids, and this warm beauty serving dinner in feathers and G string while I ate and drank and laughed till I coughed at her erotic teasing, the burlesque of the amorous greatness of heroes and kings. Good-by, good-by to those wonderful sensations. Mine at least had been the real thing. And if hers were not, she had at least been a true and understanding pal. In her percale bed. In her heaven of piled pillows. All that was probably over.
And what could you be at the Ritz but a well-conducted diner? You were attended by servitors and chefs and maîtres and grooms, waiters, and the little botónes who was dressed like an American bellhop and was filling the glasses with crystalline ice water and scraping crumbs from the linen with a broad silver blade. Him I liked best of all. There was nothing I could do under the circumstances about my desire to give a sob. It was my heartbreak hour. For I didn’t have the dough and the old woman knew it. This tunicate withered bag the Señora had my financial number. Flonzaley with his corpses would never run out of money. The course of nature itself was behind him. Cancers and aneurysms, coronaries and hemorrhages stood behind his wealth and guaranteed him bliss. All these dead, like the glorious court of Jerusalem, chanting, “Live forever, Solomon Flonzaley!” And so Flonzaley was getting Renata while I yielded a moment to bitter self-pity and saw myself very old and standing dazed in the toilet of some tenement. Perhaps like old Doc Lutz I would put two socks on one foot and pee in the bathtub. That, as Naomi said, was the end. It was just as well that the title to those graves in Waldheim had turned up in Julius’s desk. I might just need them, untimely. Tomorrow, heavy of heart, I was going to the Prado to look for the Velasquez, or was it the Murillo that resembled Renata—the one mentioned by the Chancellor of the Exchequer in Downing Street. So I sat in this scene of silver service and brandy flames and the superb flash of chafing dishes.
“I wired Renata yesterday and asked her to marry me,” I said.
“Did you? How nice. That should have been done long ago,” said the relentless Señora. “You can’t treat proud women like this. But I would be happy to have such a distinguished son-in-law and Roger loves you like his own daddy.”
“But she hasn’t answered me.”
“The postal system isn’t working. Haven’t you heard, Italy is breaking down?” she said. “Did you telephone too?”
“I tried, Señora. I hesitate to call in the middle of the night. Anyway there’s never an answer.”
“She may have gone with her father for the holiday. Maybe Biferno still owns his house in the Dolomites.”
“Why don’t you use your influence for me, Señora,” I said. This capitulation was a