The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [164]
know, but quick, that you, a man, could talk, but she was the one for whom it was the flesh and blood trouble, and she even had a pride about it that made her cheeks shine, that in her was something ultimate. I didn't keep up these arguments with her. And although not convinced by her, I wasn't utterly horrified for the unborn either. To be completely consistent in that kind of economy of souls you would have to have great uneasiness and remorse that wombs should ever be unoccupied; likewise, that hospitals, prisons, and madhouses and graves should ever be full. That wide a spread is too much. The decision was really up to her, whether to have a child by Frazer who wasn't free to' marry her now, even if she wanted to marry him. And, by the way, I | didn't take at face value all that she said about him. However, I wasn't any too sure about the injection. I wanted to ask Padilla about it, who was my scientific authority, and I tried to get him at his laboratory. If he didn't know the answer himself he could ask one of his biological buddies in that semi-skyscraper of a building where there were always dogs barking with abnormal strain, which made me flinch a little when I heard it. Padilla didn't seem to mind this; he only went there to do calculations in that slip-slop queer swift way, standing on an eccentric point, a hand in his pocket and an untouched cigarette burning with forked smoke. But I couldn't find him before Mimi's appointment with the doctor. To which I took her. Inis doctor was a man made dolorous, or anyhow heavy of mood, y the bad times, and he looked very unprofessional. There was a careess office of old equipment, and he sat in rolled sleeves and smoked 'gars at a desk where my book-accustomed eyes spotted a Spinoza a Hegel and other things odd for a doctor, and especially one in his line. Under him there was a music shop. My memory gives me back the name: Stracciatella. In the window there was the entire family, playing guitars to a microphone--the young girls and bareleooed boys whose feet didn't yet touch the floor, and the sounds covering the street, cold that night, after a snowfall, with a noise of wires stronger even than the competition of the streetcars, old on that line and passing with a ruckus. The doctor didn't misrepresent what he had to offer--he was too careless even for that. He wasn't hardhearted maybe, but he appeared to ask, "What could I accomplish by caring?" Perhaps there was a disdain about him for the double powerlessness of creatures, first to oppose love and then to be free of the consequences. Naturally he took me for the lover. I suppose Mimi wanted him to; as for me, that wasn't what I cared about. Therefore, this was how we were, in the office, the stout doctor explaining his injection for our lay understanding, fatfaced, dry, unarduous, heavy of breath, his arms hairy, the office stinking of cigars and of his sedentary career in old black leather. He was not actually unkind, in his goggles, and partly a man of thought--just as far as the difficulties that purify, and no farther. Then the guitars breaking their step, a wiry woe and clatter. And Mimi with fair face and hair, red cheeks, a cloth rose laying down its folds front and center of her hat, assisted by white and less serious flowers .0 that red! of summer walls and yet of fabric and the counters of stores. Also her demonish or ciliary eyebrows, so hard-set and yet she was also so confused. But the time was one of the highest opportunity, if I understood her spirit, having to do with that same powerlessness the doctor ohserved--the powerlessness of women waiting for what will be done to them, and that way and none other to buy glory. "This injection causes contractions," said the doctor, "and it may expel your trouble. Nobody can promise that it will, and sometimes even if it works you still need a dilation and curettage. The thing actresses in Hollywood describe in the paper as appendicitis." "I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't make any jokes. I'm only interested in your medical services," Mimi told him right off, and