Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [76]
I was present in the kitchen when Kathleen made a serious mistake. Holding her drink and an unlit cigarette she reached into a man’s pocket for a match. He was not a stranger, we knew him well, his name was Eubanks, and he was a Negro composer. His wife was standing near him. Kathleen was beginning to recover her spirits and was slightly drunk herself. But just as she was getting the matches out of Eubanks’s pocket Humboldt came in. I saw him coming. First he stopped breathing. Then he clutched Kathleen with sensational violence. He twisted her arm behind her back and ran her out of the kitchen into the yard. A thing of this sort was not unusual at a Littlewood party, and others decided not to notice, but Demmie and I hurried to the window. Humboldt punched Kathleen in the belly, doubling her up. Then he pulled her by the hair into the Buick. As there was a car behind him he couldn’t back out. He wheeled over the lawn and off the sidewalk, hacking off the muffler on the curb. I saw it there next morning like the case of a super-insect, flaky with rust, and a pipe coming out of it. Also I found Kathleen’s shoes stuck by the heels in the snow. There was fog, ice, dirty cold, the bushes glassy, the elm twigs livid, the March snow brocaded with soot.
And now I recalled that the rest of the night had been a headache because Demmie and I were overnight guests, and when the party broke up Littlewood took me aside and proposed man to man that we do a swap. “An Eskimo wife deal. What say we have a romp,” he said. “A wingding.”
“Thanks, no, it isn’t cold enough for this Eskimo stuff.”
“You’re refusing on your own? Aren’t you even going to ask Demmie?”
“She’d haul off and hit me. Perhaps you’d like to try her. You wouldn’t believe how hard she can punch. She looks like a fashionable broad, and elegant, but she’s really a big honest hick.”
I had my own reasons for giving him a soft answer. We were overnight guests here. I didn’t want to go at 2 a.m. to sit in the Pennsylvania waiting room. Entitled to my eight hours of oblivion and determined to have them, I got into bed in the smoky study through which the party had swirled. But now Demmie had put on her nightgown and was a changed person. An hour ago in a black chiffon dress and the hair brushed gold and long on her head and fastened with an ornament she was a young lady of breeding. Humboldt, when he was in a balanced state, loved to cite the important American social categories, and Demmie belonged to them all. “She’s pure Main Line. Quaker schools, Bryn Mawr. Real class,” Humboldt said. She had chatted with Little-wood, whose subject was Plautus, about Latin translation and New Testament Greek. I didn’t love the farmer’s daughter in Demmie less than the society girl. She now sat on the bed. Her toes were deformed by cheap shoes. Her large collarbones formed hollows. When they were children, she and her sister, similarly built, filled up these collarbone hollows with water and ran races.
Anything to stave off sleep. Demmie took pills but she deeply feared to sleep. She said she had a hangnail and sat on the bed filing away, the long flexible file going zigzag. Suddenly lively, she faced me cross-legged with round knees and a show of thigh. In this position she released the salt female odor, the bacterial background of deep love. She said, “Kathleen shouldn’t have reached for Eubanks’s matches. I hope Humboldt didn’t hurt her, but she shouldn’t have done it.”
“But Eubanks is an old friend.”
“Humboldt’s old friend? He’s known him a long time—there’s a difference. It means something if a woman goes into a man