The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [146]
in strapless gown appealing with her lifted ^m and fine teeth, or the chairman of a board finishing a drink. Simon grasped very soon the importance for business of such close Fontact. Didn't the Chief Executive pass sleepless nights at Yalta be229 cause Stalin for the first two days did not smile? He couldn't deal with a man who wouldn't yield to charm or trade on the basis of love. There had to be sport and amiability to temper decisions that could not all be pleasant, and at least the flash of personality helped. This was something Simon well understood, how to be liked, and how to reach an accord on the basis of secret thoughts with people similarly placed. But I'm still in the middle of the summer with him, at the worst of his trouble when he was envenomed with the fear that he'd go bankrupt, and he had to confess to himself, I'm sure, that he was really afraid of the Magnuses, and terrified by what he had taken on himself. So I spent most of these months with him. I won't say we were never closer--he kept his ultimate thoughts stubbornly to himself--but we were never more together. From the fresh of morning to the grime and horn color of late afternoon I rode in the car with him and made all his stops--downtown, the union hall, the bank, the South Water market office Charlotte was managing for her Uncle Robby, the kitchen at Magnuses' where we stopped to get sandwiches from the black cook, or the back room where they had put the marriage bed--the marriage still the secret of the immediate family. Here the door opened on what supported the weight of this heaped-up life. The room had been refurnished for him and Charlotte with silk-shaded reading lamps, bedside fleeces, drapes against the alley view and its barbarity--as in a palazzo against the smell of the canals--a satin cover on the bed, and auxiliary pillows on the roll of the bolster. To save steps to the dresser Simon walked on the bed. He changed clothes, letting things lie where they were dropped or flung, kicking his shoes into the corner and drying the sweat from his naked body with an undershirt. There were days when he changed three times, or four, and others when he might sit listless and indifferent, and get up from his office chair heavy after hours of silence, saying, "Let's get out of here." Instead of going home to change, sometimes he'd drive to the lake. We'd go swimming at the North Avenue point the late Commissioner had loved. In whose mouth, as he floated by, I used to place cigarettes. The loose spread of Simon's legs as he plunged and the embracing awkwardness of his arms to the water gave me the worry that he threw himself in with a thought of never coming back to the surface alive, as if he went to take a blind taste of the benefits of staying down. He came up haggard and with a slack gasp of his mouth and rough blood in his face. I knew it made a strong appeal to him to go down and not come up again. Even if he didn't make a display of this half-a-desire and swam up and down, sullen, with flattened coarse hair, making master passes at the water; the water turned around on the shore and its crowd and carried black spools in its horizon, the cool paving of one of the imaginary series of worlds, clear into the naming ether. My brother down there, as if Alexander in the harmful Cydnus whose cold made him sick when he leaped in after battle, I stood in striped trunks with toes bent over the wood of a pile, ready to jump after if need be. I didn't go in when he did. He came up the ladder shivering, the big flies bit nastily, the hullabaloo waterside carnival turned your head. I'd help him dry; he'd lie down on the stone like a sick man. But when he'd warm and get his comfort back, he'd start to make bullish approaches to women and girls, his eyes big and red, and as if someone who bent over to choose a plum from her lunch bag was making the offer of a Pasiphae. And then he'd start to blare like brass and he'd hit me on the arm and say to me, "Look at the spread on that broad!" forgetting that he was not only married but also engaged-- the engagement