The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [130]
sure, though, that she would have no interest in Clem, at least for the time being, was that lately Frazer had been phoning with regularity, and she took her time about descending when I buzzed her. He, knowing it was I that answered the phone, said, ' 'Can't you get her to make it a little faster, Mr. March?" To which I said, "I can try, but I'm not King Canute, you know," and let the big club of the receiver hang from the cord. What do you want?" were her first words when she laid her burning cigarette on the instrument box. "I can't talk to you. I'm stymied. If you want to find out how I am you can come over in person and ask." And then in her joyful, reckless way of welcoming her anger, "All right, you don't care, I don't care either. No, I haven't come around yet, "t don't worry, you won't have to marry me. I wouldn't marry a man who doesn't know what love is. You don't want a wife, you want a looking glass. What! What do you mean, money! You still owe me forty-seven dollars. That's okay. I don't care what it was spent for. If I'm up the stump I'll take care of it myself. Sure you owe everybody. Don't give me that kind of stuff. Tell it to your wife. She seems to swallow everything." Frazer was not yet divorced from his first wife, from whom Mimi, in her version of it, had rescued him. "Do you remember a picture called The Island of Dr. Moreau? This mad scientist made men and women out of animals? And they called the laboratory 'The House of Pain'? Well, with his wife he was living like one of those animals," she once told me, speaking of how she had first found him. "This girl had a flat--you wouldn't believe a man like Hooker could live in it; no matter what I think of his personality, he's intelligent, he has ideas; when he was a Communist he was chosen to go study at the Lenin Institute, where they train national leaders like Cachin and Mao; he didn't make it because he was expelled over the German question. Well, in this flat there were chenille rugs in the toilet so you felt you were doing wrong, going in your shoes. A man can't do anything while putting up with that. Women really are no good, Augie," she declared with her characteristic and favorite humorous rage. "They're no f-- good. They want a man in the house. Just there, in the house. Sitting in his chair. They pretend to take what he thinks and says seriously. Is it about government? Is it about astronomy? So they play along and make believe they care about parties and stars. They baby men, and they don't care what game they play, just so there's i im a man in the house. If the husband is a Socialist, she's a Socialist, I! hotter than he, and if he changes into a Technocrat she beats him to it --she makes him think so. All she really cares about is to have a man in the house and doesn't give a hoot in hell what she says she is. And m it isn't even hypocritical, it's deeper than that. It's having the man." a With things like this--and it was one of many--Mimi tried to pierce you through. Sufficiently said, I suppose, the thing was true for her. | She believed in words, in speaking, and if she convinced you, then she ^ herself could believe what her inspiration told her. And when it came | to speaking, she had borrowed some from Frazer--that private forensic method that didn't always seem quite right in personal conversation: he with his long knees spread and elbows resting on them, hands clasped, perfect earnestness of eyes, and, as a further warrant of plain talk, the straight white middle part of his sandy hair. Mimi followed his manner as much as she might, and she had more knottedness in her and passion, and the speed you can get from narrow gauge and high compression. She was, as Einhorn had rightly said that I was, in opposition; only she named names and wrongs, and was an attacker where I had other ways, temperamentally, and she didn't persuade me. I didn't believe she was right because emphatic. "Well," she said, "if you don't agree with me, why are you quiet? Why don't you say what you think instead of turning down what I say by grinning? You try