Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [30]
Well, ten years later Denise and I were husband and wife. And we were invited to the White House by the President and Mrs. Kennedy in black tie for a cultural evening. Denise consulted twenty or thirty women about dresses, shoes, gloves. Very intelligent, she always read up on national and world problems at the beauty parlor. Her hair was heavy and worn high. It wasn’t easy to be sure when she had had it done, but I could always tell from her dinner conversation whether she’d been to the hairdresser that afternoon, because she was a speed reader and covered every detail of world crisis under the dryer. “Do you realize what Khrushchev did in Vienna?” she said. So at the beauty salon, to prepare for the White House, she mastered Time and Newsweek and The U.S. News and World Report. On the flight to Washington we reviewed the Bay of Pigs and the Missile Crisis and the Diem problem. Her nervous intensity is constitutional. After dinner she got hold of the President and spoke to him privately. I saw her cornering him in the Red Room. I knew that she was driving urgently over the tangle of lines dividing her own terrible problems—and they were all terrible!—from the perplexities and disasters of world politics. It was all one indivisible crisis. I knew that she was saying, “Mr. President, what can be done about this?” Well, we woo one another with everything we’ve got. I tittered to myself when I saw them together. But JFK could take care of himself, and he liked pretty women. I suspected that he read The U.S. News and World Report, too, and that his information might not be much better than her own. She’d have made him an excellent Secretary of State, if some way could be found to wake her before 11 a.m. For she’s quite marvelous. And a real beauty. And much more litigious than Humboldt Fleisher. He mainly threatened. But from the time of the divorce I have been entangled in endless ruinous lawsuits. The world has seldom seen a more aggressive subtle resourceful plaintiff than Denise. Of the White House I mainly remembered the impressive hauteur of Charles Lindbergh, the complaint of Edmund Wilson that the government had made a pauper of him, the Catskill resort music played by the Marine Corps orchestra, and Mr. Tate keeping time with his fingers on the knee of a lady.
One of Denise’s big grievances was that I wouldn’t allow her to lead this kind of life. The great captain Citrine who once had burst the buckles of his armor in heroic scuffles now cooled gypsy Renata’s lust and in his dotage had bought a luxury Mercedes-Benz. When I came to call for Lish and Mary, Denise told me to make sure the car was well aired. She didn’t want it smelling of Renata. Butts stained with her lipstick had to be emptied from the ashtray. She once marched out of the house and did this herself. She said there must be no Kleenexes smeared with God-knows-what.
Apprehensive, I picked out Denise’s number on the telephone. I was in luck, the maid answered, and I told her, “I can’t fetch the girls today. I’ve got car trouble.”
Downstairs I found that I could squeeze into the Mercedes and though the windshield was bad, I thought I could manage the driving if the police didn’t stop me. I tested this by going to the bank where I drew the new money. It was given to me in a plastic envelope. I didn’t fold this packet but laid it next to my wallet. Then from a phone booth I made an appointment at the Mercedes shop. You’ve got to have an appointment—you don’t barge in to the garage as you did in the old mechanic days. Then, still on the pay phone, I tried again to get hold of George Swiebel. Apparently I had said, while sounding off during the card game, that George enjoyed going with his old father to the Baths on Division Street near what used to be Robey Street. Probably Cantabile hoped to catch George there.
As a kid I went to the Russian Bath with my own father. This old establishment has been there forever, hotter than