Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [99]
“It’s not as though Denise didn’t deserve it,” said Renata.
“She is a maddening pest, that’s true enough, and I always laughed when I read how old Mr. Karamazov rushed into the street when he heard that his wife was gone shouting, ‘The bitch is dead!’—But Denise,” said Citrine the lecturer, “is a comical, not a tragic personality. Besides, she shouldn’t die to gratify me. Most important are the girls, they need a mother. Anyhow it’s idiotic to hear people say kill, murder, die, death—they haven’t the faintest idea what they’re talking about. There isn’t one person in ten thousand that understands the first thing about death.”
“What do you suppose will happen downtown today?”
“Oh, the usual thing. They’ll mobbalize me, as we used to say in grammar school. I’ll represent human dignity, and they’ll give me hell.”
“Well, must you do the dignity bit? You’re stuck with it, while they have all the fun. If you could find some way to crush ‘em, it would be so nice. . . . Well, here’s my client on the corner. Isn’t she built like a bouncer in a clip joint! You don’t have to take part in the conversation, it’s enough that she bores and badgers me. You just tune out and meditate. If she doesn’t choose her upholstery material today I’ll cut her throat.”
Immense and fragrant in black and white silk, large polka dots covering her bosom (which I could, and did, visualize), Fannie Sunderland got in. I withdrew to the back seat, warning her about the hole in the floor, covered by a square of tin. The heavy samples carried by her salesman ex-husband had actually worn out the metal of Renata’s Pontiac. “Unfortunately,” said Renata, “our Mercedes is in the shop for repairs.”
In the mental discipline I had recently begun, and of which I already felt the good effects, stability equipoise and tranquillity were the prerequisites. I said to myself, “Tranquillity, tranquillity.” As on the racquet ball court I said, “Dance, dance, dance!” And it always had some result. The will is a link which connects the soul to the world as-it-is. Through the will the soul frees itself from distraction and mere dreams. But when Renata told me to tune out and meditate she struck a note of malice. She was needling me about Doris, the daughter of Dr. Scheldt, the anthroposophist from whom I had been getting instruction. Renata was terribly jealous of Doris. “That baby bitch!” Renata cried. “I know she couldn’t wait to jump into your bed.” But this was Renata’s own fault, her very own doing. She and her mother, the Señora, had decided that I needed a lesson. They shut the door in my face. By invitation, I came to Renata’s apartment for dinner one night and found myself locked out. Someone else was with her. For several months I was too depressed to be alone. I moved in with George Swiebel and slept on his sofa. I would sit up suddenly in the night with a crying fit, sometimes waking George who came out and turned on a lamp, his wrinkled pajamas baring powerful legs. He made this measured statement: “A man in his fifties who can break up and cry over a girl is a man I respect.”
I said, “Oh hell! What are you talking about! I’m a moron. It’s disgraceful to carry on like this.”
Renata had taken up with a man named Flonzaley....
But I’m getting ahead of myself. I sat behind the two fragrant chatting ladies. We turned into Forty-seventh Street, the boundary between rich man’s Kenwood and poor man’s Oakwood, passing the locked tavern which lost its license because a fellow had gotten twenty stab wounds there over a matter of eight dollars. This was what Cantabile meant by “crazy buffaloes.” Where was the victim? He was buried. Who was he? Nobody could tell you. And now others, casually regardant, passed the place in automobiles still thinking of an “I,” and of the past and the prospects of this “I.” If there was nothing in this but some funny egoism, some illusion that fate was being outwitted, avoidance of the reality of the grave, perhaps it was scarcely worth the trouble. But that remained to be seen.
George Swiebel, that vitality-worshiper, thought it was