The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [162]
you fussing about? It wasn't much of an accident, and you're insured." This was just where the error was; it was that I had to feel bad about the back shell of the car and those crustacean eyes that were draggino by the wires, and it wasn't so much the accident as my failure to care as I should that he minded. That was why he burned me with his eyes and showed his brokenedged tooth while his head settled downward with menace. I was too despondent to stand up to him. Nothing visible backed me, as it did him, to see and trust, but all was vague on my side and yet it was also very stubborn. I stayed in that evening to read. According to our agreement I was to start at the university in the spring, when business would let up a little and Simon could spare me. I still had the craving that I had given in to all summer long when I had lived on books, to have the reach to grasp both ends of the frame and turn the big image-taking glass to any scene of the world. By now Padilla had sold most of my books for me--he himself had given up stealing lately since he had taken a parttime job calculating the speed of nerve impulses in a biophysics lab-- and I had only a few things left. However, there was Einhorn's firedamaged set of classics in a box under the bed, and I picked out Schiller's Thirty Years' War and was lying in my socks reading when Mimi Villars came in. Often she came and went without talking to me, only for her things in the closet. But she had something to say tonight, and didn't spar, but told me, "Frazer knocked me up." "Gosh, are you sure?" "Of course I'm sure. Come out with me. I want to talk to you and I don't want Kayo to be in on it. He listens through the wall." It was black weather, not too cold but very windy, and the street light was hacked and banged like a cymbal. "But where's Frazer?" I said, having been out of touch with the house lately. "He had to leave. He has to read a damn paper at a convention in Louisiana, Christmas, and so he went to see his folks first, because he can't be with them for the holiday. But what difference is it where he is--what's the good of him?" "Well, honestly now, Mimi, wouldn't you like it if you could get married?" She gave me enough silence in which to take it back, looking at me252 | "You must think I lose my head easily," she said when I didn't retract. We hadn't gone down into the wind yet; we were on the porch. She had one foot pointed to the side and her hand coming from her deep sleeve held the back of her neck while her round face of tough happiness was turned close under mine. Tough happiness? Yes, or hard amusement, or something spiritual and gymnastic, with pain done to the brows to make them point finely. "If I wouldn't marry him before, why should I now because of an accident? I see you've been under pood influences. Let's go get a cup of coffee." She took my arm, and we got as far as the corner, where we stopped again and were talking when a little dog came up, followed by his mistress in a Persian lamb coat and astrakhan hat, and an astonishing thing happened of the sort that made me see how believable it was that Mimi should have grabbed the gun from a stickup man and shot him; for the dog, somehow misoriented, perhaps because of the strong weather, wet on Mimi's ankle, and she shouted at the woman, who seemed incapable of looking to see what was happening, "Take away your dog!" And then she tore off the woman's high fur hat to dry herself with it and left her like that, her hairdress beginning to be destroyed by the wind as she cried out, "My hat!" The hat was on the street where Mimi had flung it. That lack of respect in occurrences for the difficulties that there already are! But then proofs always flocked to Mimi to help her make her case. Anyway, in the drugstore, when she had stripped off and rolled her stocking and put it in her bag, it only made her laugh. A real and pure chance for temper tickled her heart. But what she wanted to discuss over coffee was a new method of abortion she had heard about. She had already tried drugs like ergoapiol, with walking,