The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [134]
Which I was bound to spare him. Anyway, his defects weren't as serious to me as they were to Mimi. With me he could be fully confident, and some of his charm couldn't live except in the presence of confidence. "How's tricks, kid?" he said with a rejoicing smile--but darkness and bitterness could never wholly leave it any more--and while he gentled his palms on his doublebreasted joint belly and chest. "What are you up to? Getting by? What are you here, a student? No. A macher? A proletarian?" This word, even jesting, he pronounced with veneration. "Well, a sort of student." "Our boys," he replied, more deeply smiling. "Anything but honest labor. And how's your brother Simon? What's he doing? I thought I could recruit him once. He'd have made a good revolutionary. Where are they going to come from if not from your kind of background? But I guess I couldn't make him see it. He's very intelligent though. One day he'll see it himself." In the peculiar fate of people that makes them fat and rich, when this happens very swiftly there is the menace of the dreamy state that plunders their reality. Let's say that anyway old age and death would come, so why shouldn't the passage be comfortable? But this proposal doesn't make a firm mind, in the strange area where things swim too fast. Against this trouble thought may be a remedy; force of person is another one, and money and big-scale lavishness, unpierceable concreteness, organizational deeds. So there are these various remedies and many more, older ones, but you don't actually have full choice among all the varieties, especially those older ones of the invisible world. Most people make do with what they have, and labor in their given visible world, and this has its own stubborn merit. Not only did Simon make what he had do, but he went the limit. It astonished me how he took his objectives and did exactly what he had projected. It was well-nigh unfair to have called the turns so accurately and to do to people what he planned while he was still a stranger to them. Charlotte was in love with him. Not only that, but they were already married, and it wasn't only he who had hastened and pushed the thing, but she too was in a hurry. Partly because he was too broke to court her long. He told her that, and she and her parents agreed they shouldn't waste time. Only, the ceremony was performed out of town to keep the news out of the papers, and for the rest of the family there had to be an engagement and a wedding. So Charlotte and her mother had worked it out, and while Simon paid rent in a good bachelor's club downtown he was actually living with the Magnuses in their huge old West Side flat. He came to see me after the one-day honeymoon which was all the secrecy of the marriage gave them time for. They had been in Wisconsin. Already he had more new attributes than I could keep track of, draped in comfortable flannel, owning a new lighter, and effects in his pockets he didn't yet have the hang of. He said, "The Magnuses have been wonderful to me." There was a new gray Pontiac at the curb--he showed it to me from the window; and he was learning the coal business at one of the Magnuses' yards.. "And what about your own yard? Didn't you say--" "Certainly, I said. They've promised me that as soon as I can run place myself. It won't take long. No, it hasn't been so hard," he aid further, understanding my unasked question. "They'd rather have a poor young man. A poor young man gets up more steam and pressure They were like that themselves, and they know." Already he didn't look like such a poor young man in the high qualitv eray flannel, and shoes with new stitching; his shirt smelled of the store; it hadn't been to the laundry yet. "Get dressed, I'm taking you to dinner there," he said. When we were outside, walking down the path to the car, he took a stiff shot of breath and hawked, exactly as on the day I went with him to the La Salle Street Station where apparently I was too dumb to sell papers. Except that this time he had gloomy big rings round his eyes; and we sat down in the car, which