The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [135]
had that sour spice of new rubber and car upholstery. It was the first time I had seen him drive. He swung it round like a veteran, even somewhat recklessly. So I was taken into that hot interior of lamps and rugs, to the Magnuses'. Everything was ungainly there, roomy and oversized. The very parrots painted on the lampshades were as big as Rhode Island Reds. The Magnuses too were big; they had a Netherlandish breadth of bone. My sister-in-law was of that size also, and was aware or shy of it as indelicacy, giving me the touch of her hand as though it were a smaller one. She needn't have. It's difficult when outsized people worry about their presentation, and women especially, who have secret dismay of grossness. She had remarkably handsome eyes, soft, with occasional lights of distaste though, shrewd, and expressing immense power of management; "but also they were warm. So was her bosom', which was abundant, and she had large hips. She was on her guard with me, as if afraid of my criticism, of what I would say to Simon the first time we were alone. She must have convinced herself that he had done her a great favor by marrying her, he was so obviously smart and good-looking, and at the same time she was swept with resentment lest she shouldn't be thought good enough or the money be too much remembered. The issue most alive was whether he would have married her without money. It was much too troubling not to be spoken fi so it was spoken of in a kind of fun and terrible persiflage. Simon ^d it with the kind of coarseness that has to be laughed at because to take it seriously would be murder--his saying, for instance, when lae three of us were left alone in the parlor to become acquainted, Nobody's ever been laid better at any price." It was so ambiguous and insids-out as to who had paid the price that it had to be taken as "sing, and she hurried and came down from a romantic, senti215 mental position and denied it all by pretending that this randy talk was the joke of sincerity and deep underlying agreement, a more realistic sort of love. But leaning above him like a kind of flounced Pisan tower construction--she dressed with luxury and daring--keeping a hand on his hair, she had instants of great difficulty before me. She had difficulty only for a while, until she absorbed from Simon the attitude that I was a featherhead, affectionate but not long on good sense. She soon enough learned to deal with me. But it was painful until she found confidence, and I suppose that at the time she hadn't recovered from the honeymoon, which, Simon had been frank to tell me, was awful. He didn't specify in which way, but he expressed enough to make it profoundly believable; he had some notes in the end of the scale that I would rather not have heard played for the consents to death that rang in them, but I was forced to listen to all he had, struck right on the key and sounded from top to bottom. I could be sure these said-in-jest things were the weirdest of their kind ever to be laughed at and spoken in that carpeted peace and brown-gravy velour. It was all supposed to pass for fun and bridegroom's lustiness, energy, and play-wickedness, and it came through to me that he was being tortured by thought of suicide, stronger than a mere hint, but simultaneously he could dive to clasp his compensations, such as his pride in audaciousness and strength of nerve and body or the luxury he was coming into, and furthermore, a certain recklessness in demands: the sense of what he could do and what he could exact without caring what anybody thought was much to him. Then the family came in, wondering what type- of person I might be. I wondered at them no less. They were so big you thought what could prevent them from handling even Simon and me like children, though we were by no means midgety--Simon was nearly six feet tall and I only an inch shorter than he. It was their width that made the difference, and even now that he was getting stout Simon didn't begin to approach them. They were substantial in their lives as in girth; they made their old people