Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [54]
I said, “I have leather heels. They skid.”
“You better not chicken out.”
“No, this is it,” I said. I put my arms around the pillar. I wouldn’t move.
Actually we had come far enough to suit him. “Now,” he said, “I want to show you just how much your dough means to me. You see this?” He held up a fifty-dollar bill. He rested his back on a steel upright and stripping off his fancy equestrian gloves began to fold the money. It was incomprehensible at first. Then I understood. He was making a child’s paper glider of it. Hitching back his raglan sleeve, he sent the glider off with two fingers. I watched it speeding through the strung lights with the wind behind it out into the steely atmosphere, darker and darker below. On Michigan Boulevard they had already put up the Christmas ornaments, winding tiny bubbles of glass from tree to tree. They streamed down there like cells under a microscope.
My chief worry now was how to get down. Though the papers underplay it people are always falling off. But however scared and harassed, my sensation-loving soul also was gratified. I knew that it took too much to gratify me. The gratification-threshold of my soul had risen too high. I must bring it down again. It was excessive. I must, I knew, change everything.
He sailed off more of the fifties. Tiny paper planes. Origami (my knowledgeable mind, keeping up its indefatigable pedantry —my lexical busybody mind!), the Japanese paper-folder’s art. An international congress of paper-aircraft freaks had been held, I think, last year. It seemed last year. The hobbyists were mathematicians and engineers.
Cantabile’s green bills went off like finches, like swallows and butterflies, all bearing the image of Ulysses S. Grant. They brought crepuscular fortune to people down in the streets.
“The last two I’m going to keep,” said Cantabile. “To blow them on drinks and dinner for us.”
“If I ever get down alive.”
“You did fine. Go on, lead the way, start back.”
“These leather heels are awfully tricky. I hit an ordinary piece of wax paper in the street the other day and went down. Maybe I should take my shoes off.”
“Don’t be crazy. Go on your toes.”
If you didn’t think of falling, the walkways were more than adequate. I crept along, fighting paralysis of the calves and the thighs. My face was sweating faster than the wind could dry it as I took hold of the final pillar. I thought that Cantabile had been treading much too close behind. More hard-hats waiting for the elevator probably took us for union guys or architect’s men. It was night now and the hemisphere was frozen all the way to the Gulf. Gladly I fell into the seat of the Thunderbird when we got down. He removed his hard hat and mine. He cocked the wheel and started the motor. He should really let me go now. I had given him enough satisfaction.
But he was off again, driving fast. He sped away toward the next light. My head hung back over the top of the seat in the position you take to stop a nosebleed. I didn’t know exactly where we were. “Look, Rinaldo,” I said. “You’ve made your point. You bashed my car, you’ve run me all day long, and you’ve just given me the scare of my life. Okay, I see it wasn’t the money that upset you. Let’s stuff the rest of it down a sewer so I can go home.”
“You’ve had it with me?”
“It’s been a whole day of atonement.”
“You’ve seen enough of the whatchamacallems?—I learned some new words at the poker game from you.”
“Which words?”
“Proles,” he said, “Lumps. Lumpenproletartat. You gave