The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [165]
he saw he wasn't dealing with a timid little knocked-up factory girl who was grateful, he'd think, for his wit and signal back to him dimly with a smile over the vast separating distances of real grief and danger. Some poor body in trouble from tenderness. But Mimi--her tenderness didn't have an easy visibility. You wondered what it would be, and after what terrific manifestations it would appear. "Let's just keep everything professional," she said. He said, with offended dark nose holes, "Okay, do you want the injection or not?" "Well, what the hell do you think I came all this way for, a cold night!" "He got up and put an enamel pot on the gas ring--a grizzly-claw collar of fires giving hot scratches. His handling of the pot was suggestive of the laziness and sloppiness of his morning egg in the kitchen; he dropped the hypo in, fished it up again with tongs, and was ready. "And suppose I need other help, if this only works halfway, will I get it from you?" He shrugged. Her voice began to ring. "Well, you're one hell of a doctor! Don't discuss it before you start? Or don't you give a damn what happens to people after they take your injection? You think they're so desperate you don't have to give a damn and they're only fooling with their lives, is that the way it is?" "If I had to, I might be able to do something for you."; I said, "You mean you do if you get paid. How much do you soak for it?": ^ "A hundred bucks.".,:? "You wouldn't settle for fifty?" she said.. "You might find somebody who would." He meant to show--and I thought it was genuine--that he didn't care. Non curo! That was what came easiest to him. He would just as soon have put away the hypo and gone back to picking his nose and to his ideas. I counseled her not to talk money with him. I said to her, "That part of it isn't important." "You want to go ahead with it? Look, to me it's just the same." "Mimi, you can still change your mind," I said for her own ear. ^i; "And where will I be if I change it? On the same spot still." I helped her off with her fur-collared coat, and she took me by the hand as if it were I that had to be led to the needle. At the moment of my putting my arm around her--feeling her need and wanting greatly to do all I could to meet it--she broke into sobs. The thing affected me too; I caught it from her. So we held together like what we were not, a pair of lovers. However, the doctor would not let us forget he was waiting. Sorrow^1 or tiresome, was this for him? Something between the two, and he watched how I would comfort her. Whatever there was to envy before, taking me as her lover, this was not enviable to him now. Well, he Qidn'tknow. But Mimi had decided, and she wasn't wavering; these tears didn't mean that. She gave him her arm, and he sank the needle in it; the hardlooking fluid went down. He told her she would have pains like birth pangs and had better go to bed. The bite for this was fifteen bucks, which she was able to pay; she didn't want any money from me at the moment. Not that I had a lot of it. Going with Lucy kept me broke. Frazer owed me something, but if he had been able to pay he would also have been able to send money to Mimi. She didn't want him to be bothered about it. He was still raising money for his divorce. Besides, it was part of Frazer's style not to know about such things. There was always something superior to what was happening in the immediate view, more eminent. This was a part of him that Mimi's satire was always aimed at, and yet she encouraged it as something precious as well as foolish. It wasn't that he was specially ungenerous but that he put things off to give his generosity a longer and more significant route. Anyway, Mimi went to bed, cursing the doctor, for the action had already set in. However, it was "dry," she said, and the cramps weren't going to effect anything. She shuddered and sweated, her bare shoulders thin and square above the quilt, and the childish form of her forehead painfully determined with lines, eyes greatly widened, strongly lighted blue. "Oh, that dirty, bloody gypper!";'.