Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [78]
Perhaps he hadn’t hit her, but he did watch her; he watched like a bailiff escorting a prisoner from one jail to another. He moved his chair all the while he was lecturing about De Anima, to make sure we didn’t exchange eye-signals. He laid it on so thick that we were bound to try to outwit him. And we did. We managed at last to have a few words at the clothesline in the garden. She had rinsed her stockings and came out into the sunshine to hang them. Humboldt was probably satisfying a natural need.
“Did he sock you or not?”
“No, I fell on the dashboard. But it’s hell, Charlie. Worse than ever.”
The clothesline was old and dark gray. It had burst open and was giving up its white pith.
“He says I’m carrying on with a critic, a young, unimportant, completely innocent fellow named Magnasco. Very nice, but my God! And I’m tired of being treated like a nymphomaniac and told how I’m doing it on fire escapes or standing up, in clothes closets, every chance I get. And at Yale he made me sit on the platform during his reading. Then he blamed me for showing my legs. At every service station he forces his way into the ladies’ room with me. I can’t go back to New Jersey with him.”
“What will you do?” said eager, heart-melting, concerned Citrine.
“Tomorrow when we get back to New York I’m going to get lost. I love him but I can’t take any more. I’m telling you to prepare you, because you guys love each other, and you’ll have to help him. He has some money. Hildebrand fired him. But he did get a Guggenheim, you know.”
“I didn’t even know he applied.”
“Oh he puts in for everything. . . . Now he’s watching us from the kitchen.”
And there indeed was Humboldt bulging out the coppery webbing of the screen door like a fisherman’s strange catch.
“Good luck.”
As she went back to the house her legs were eagerly beaten by the grass of May. Through stripes of shrub shadow and country sunshine, the cat was strolling. The clothesline surrendered the pith of its soul, and Kathleen’s stockings, hung at the wide end, now suggested lust. Such was Humboldt’s effect. He came straight to me at the clothesline and ordered me to tell him what we had been talking about.
“Oh lay off, will you Humboldt? Don’t force me into this neurotic superdrama.” I was appalled by what I foresaw. I wished they would go—pile into their Buick (more than ever the muddy Flanders Field staff car) and pull out, leaving me with my Trenck troubles, the tyranny of Lampton, and the clean Atlantic shore.
But they stayed over. Humboldt didn’t sleep. The wooden treads of the backstairs creaked all night under his weight. The tap ran and the refrigerator door slammed. When I came into the kitchen in the morning I found that the quart of Beefeater’s gin, the house present they had brought was empty on the table. The cotton wads of his pill bottles were all over the place, like rabbit droppings.
So Kathleen disappeared from Rocco’s Restaurant on Thompson Street and Humboldt went wild. He said she was with Mag-nasco, that Magnasco kept her hidden in his room at the Hotel Earle. Somewhere Humboldt obtained a pistol and he hammered on Magnasco’s door with the butt until he shredded the wood. Magnasco called the desk, and the desk sent for the cops, and Humboldt took off. But next day he jumped Magnasco on Sixth Avenue in front of Howard Johnson’s. A group of lesbians gotten up as longshoremen rescued the young man. They had been having ice-cream sodas, and they came out and broke up the fight, pinning Humboldt’s arms behind him. It was a blazing afternoon and the women prisoners at the detention center on Greenwich Avenue were shrieking from the open windows and unrolling toilet-paper streamers.
Humboldt phoned me in the country and said, “Charlie, where is Kathleen?”
“I don’t know.