Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [29]
What a fascist! But maybe he was only priming or haranguing himself to keep up the savagery level. By now, however, my only object was to get rid of him by submission and agreement. “Any way you want it,” I said. “Where shall I bring this money?”
“The Russian Bath on Division Street,” he said.
“That old joint? For the love of God!”
“You be in front, there, at one-forty-five and wait. And alone!” he said.
I answered, “Right.” But he hadn’t waited for agreement. Again I heard the dial tone. I identified this interminable squalling with the anxiety level of the disengaged soul.
I had to put myself into motion. And I couldn’t expect Renata to do anything for me. Renata, at business today, was attending an auction, and she’d have been miffed if I had called the auction rooms to ask her to take me to the Northwest Side. She’s an obliging and beautiful woman, she has marvelous breasts, but she takes offense at certain kinds of slights and quickly flares up. Well, I’d manage it all somehow. Perhaps the Mercedes could be driven to the shop. A tow truck might not be needed. And then I’d have to find a taxi or call the Emery Livery Service or Rent-a-Car. I wouldn’t ride the bus. There are too many armed drunkards and heroin users on the buses and trains. But, no, wait! First, I must call Murra and then run to the bank. Also I had to explain that I couldn’t drive Lish and Mary to their piano lesson. This made my heart particularly heavy, because I’m somewhat afraid of Denise. She still wields a certain power. Denise made a great production of these lessons. But with her everything was a production, everything was momentous, critical. All psychological problems relating to the children were presented with great intensity. Questions of child development were desperate, dire, mortal. If these kids were ruined it would be my fault. I had abandoned them at a most perilous moment in the history of civilization to take up with Renata. “That whore with fat tits”—was what Denise regularly called her. She spoke of beautiful Renata always as a gross tough broad. The trend of her epithets, it seemed, was to make a man of Renata and a woman of me.
Denise, like my wealth, goes back to the Belasco Theatre. Trenck was played by Murphy Verviger and the star had a retinue (a dresser, a press agent, an errand boy). Denise, who was living with Verviger at the St. Moritz, arrived with his other attendants daily, carrying his script. Dressed in a plum velvet jump-suit she wore her hair down. Elegant, slender, slightly flat-chested, high-shouldered, wide across the top like an old-fashioned kitchen chair, she had large violet eyes, a marvelously rich subtle color in her face and a mysterious, seldom visible down, even over her nose. Because of the August heat the great doors offstage were open on the cement alleys and the daylight stealing in showed the appalling baldness and decay of the antique luxury. The Belasco was like a gilded cake-platter with grimed frosting. Verviger, his face deeply grooved at the mouth, was big and muscular. He resembled a skiing instructor. Some concept of intense refinement was eating at him. His head was shaped like a busby, a high solid arrogant rock covered with thick moss. Denise kept rehearsal notes for him. She wrote with terrible concentration, as if she were the smartest pupil in the class and the rest of the fifth grade were in pursuit. When she came to ask a question she held the script to her chest and spoke to me in a condition of operatic crisis. Her voice seemed to make her own hair bristle and to dilate her astonishing eyes. She said, “Verviger wants to know how you’d like him to pronounce this word”— she printed it out for me, FINITE. “He says he can do it fin-it, or fine-it, or fine-ite. He doesn’t take my word for it—fine-ite!”
I said, “Why so fancy? ... I don’t care what he does with it.” I didn’t add that I despaired of Verviger anyway. He had the play wrong from top to bottom. Maybe he was getting things right at the St. Moritz. That didn’t concern