Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [51]
Our next stop was in the Hancock Building, somewhere on the sixtieth or seventieth story. It looked like a private apartment, and yet it seemed also to be a place of business. It was furnished in decorator style with plastic, trick art objects hanging on the walls, geometrical forms of the trompe l’oeil type that intrigue business people. They are peculiarly vulnerable to art racketeers. The gentleman who lived here was elderly, in a brown hopsack sports jacket with gold threads and a striped shirt on his undisciplined belly. White hair was slicked back upon his narrow head. The liver stains on his hands were large. Under the eyes and about the nose he did not look altogether well. As he sat on the low sofa which, judging by the way it gave under him, was stuffed with down, his alligator loafers extended far into the ivory shag carpet. The pressure of his belly brought out the shape of his phallus on his thigh. Long nose, gaping lip, and wattles went with all this velvet, the gold-threaded hopsack, brocade, satin, the alligator skin, and the trompe l’oeil objects. From the conversation I gathered that his line was jewelry and that he dealt with the underworld. Perhaps he was also a fence—how would I know? Rinaldo Cantabile and his wife had an anniversary coming and he was shopping for a bracelet. A Japanese houseboy served drinks. I am not a great drinker but today I understandably wanted whisky and I took another double shot of Black Label. From the skyscraper I could contemplate the air of Chicago on this short December afternoon. A ragged western sun spread orange light over the dark shapes of the town, over the branches of the river and the black trusses of bridges. The lake, gilt silver and amethyst, was ready for its winter cover of ice. I happened to be thinking that if Socrates was right, that you could learn nothing from trees, that only the men you met in the street could teach you something about yourself, I must be in a bad way, running off into the scenery instead of listening to my human companions. Evidently I did not have a good stomach for human companions. To get relief from uneasiness or heaviness of heart I was musing about the water. Socrates would have given me a low mark. I seemed rather to be on the Wordsworth end of things —trees, flowers, water. But architecture, engineering, electricity, technology had brought me to this sixty-fourth story. Scandinavia had put this glass in my hand, Scotland had filled it with whisky, and I sat there recalling certain marvelous facts about the sun, namely, that the light of other stars when it entered the sun’s gravitational field, had to bend. The sun wore a shawl made of this universal light. So Einstein, sitting thinking of things, had foretold. And observations made by Arthur Eddington during an eclipse proved it. Finding before seeking.
Meantime the phone rang continually and not a single call seemed local. It was all Las Vegas, L.A., Miami, and New York. “Send your boy over to Tiffany and find out what they get for an item like that,” our host was saying. I then heard him speak of estate-jewels, and of an Indian prince who was trying to sell a whole lot of stuff in the USA and inviting bids.
At one interval, while Cantabile was fussing over a tray of diamonds (nasty, that white stuff seemed to me), the old gentleman spoke to me. He said, “I know you from somewhere, don’t I?”
“Yes,” I said. “From the whirlpool at the Downtown Health Club, I think.”
“Oh yeah sure, I met you with that lawyer fellow. He’s a big talker.”
“Szathmar?”
“Alec Szathmar.”
Cantabile said, fingering diamonds and not lifting his face from the dazzle of the velvet tray, “I know that son of a bitch Szathmar. He claims to be an old buddy of yours, Charlie.”
“True,” I said, “we were all boys at school. Including George Swiebel.”
“In the old stone age that must have been,” said Cantabile.
Yes, I had met this old gentleman in the hot chemical bath at the club, the circular bubbling whirlpool