The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [161]
smell of the whisky on an empty stomach did that for me--and to the accident, which now made my work-filthy legs too weak to hold me. I sank down in a chair. Lucy said, "Why are you so white?" And Sam came near, like the host of a B movie, concerned after all lest his sister, huggable, press-bosom dolly, get herself engaged to a weakling. With more of this interest than mercy he bent to me, the stripes of his dressing gown stretched tight over his can. H "Am I white?" I struggled to say and picked up my head. "Maybe because I haven't eaten." "Oh, how silly. Since when? Why, it's after nine." She sent Sam to the kitchen to get a sandwich and a glass of milk from the cook. "I also had an accident--almost," I said to her when he had gone, and described what had happened. I'm not sure which most came through, her concern, or the sudden thought at the rear of her mind that I was a Jonah--I, the happy lover of the present moment. Trained fine in foresight, when, as now, she wanted to make use of it, she must have been seeing a drift of hard luck if not downright misery in the horizon. "Did you damage the car badly?" she said. "It's banged up a little." < She didn't like my vagueness about it. "The trunk?" j "I don't know exactly. I broke the tail lights, that I know. About the rest it's hard to tell in the dark, but it probably isn't much." "We'll go in my car tonight," she said, "and I'll drive. You must be shaky from the accident." So we went out in her roadster, a new one her father had recently given her, to our party on the North Shore, and afterward parked in one of the big sectors of shadow around the Bahai temple to stroke, struggle and shiver at the base of that cold religious knoll and its broken-up moonlight. Things seemed as usual but were not, either for her or for me. When we got back she wanted to have another look at the damage, afraid for me. I wouldn't go bend over the back of the car with her and put my finger in the dents. I turned off her headlights, under which the examination was taking place. And in the front hall afterward, when I was in coat and hat, fondling her and being assured she loved me, I knew there was an obstruction of sympathy. She foresaw that Simon would raise hell about the damage--as he did--and what's more, no point of view but his seemed possible to her, and she was somewhat frightened at me, feeling that I had one. And I might smell her shoulder and lift up her breast, but it wasn't the same intimacy any more in that riches-cluttered hall partly inventoried by the moon, the old man snuffing upstairs, vigilant whether asleep or not. I was therefore worn out in advance of the dripping yellow morning and its sick cold and the close filthy heat of the oil-squirting stove indoors. There is a way, I don't doubt, to carry all such things like little sticks in the bulge of the flood water, if you determine your energy to flow that way, and the weight of morgues and cars depends on the hydraulic lifting power you dispose of. Napoleon when he escaped in the old box of a sledge from wintry Russia, the troops of his dead lying like so many flocks covered in snow, talked three days to Caulaincourt who probably couldn't hear very well because his ears were bandaged --his master couldn't practice his old trick of pulling them--but he must have seen in his boss's swollen face the depth that kept floating a whole Europe of details. Yes, these business people have great energy. There's a question as to what's burned to produce it and what things we can and can't burn. There's the burning of an atom. Wild northern forests go like so many punk sticks. Where's the competitor-fire kindling, and what will its strength be? And another thing is that while for the sake of another vigor is lack- ^g, for the sake of the taste 01 egg in one's mouth there's all-out effort, and that's how love is lavished. I couldn't hold up all of these different elements. Simon came in and awled me out over the car and I was too broken-down to give any back talk or even feel he was doing me wrong. All I did reply was, "What are