The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [166]
"Mimi, but he said nothing might happen. Wait--" rsti "What in the name of hell can I do now but wait when I'm shot full of this terrible poison? I must be caught strong, for it's squeezing my guts out. That lousy clumsy cow doctor! Oh!" Intermittently the spasms passed off and she found the spirit for a relieving joke. "It's sitting tight, won't budge; stubborn thing. While some women have to stay on their backs nine months to keep theirs. Listen to the radio. But"--increasing in seriousness--"I can't let it alone now and be born, with all the stuff I've taken. It might be hurt. Groggy. If not, it might be dangerous because it's so obstinate, and be a criminal. I think if he'd be wild enough and kick the world around I might let him come. Why do I say 'he' though? It might be a girl, and what would I do to a daughter, poor child? Still women--women. They do themselves more credit, there's more reality in women. They live closer to their nature. They have to. It's more with them. They have the breasts. They see their blood, and it does them good, while men are let to be vainer. Oh! give me your hand, will you, Augie, for Chrissake?" It was the return of the gripes, making her sit stiffly and squeeze and bear down on my hand. With shut eyes she let the spasm pass throuoh and then lay back, and I helped her cover up. Little by little the effect of the drug ended and left her tired in the muscles and belly, furious with the doctor and angry also with me. "But you know he didn't make any promises." "Don't be stupid," she said, ugly. "How do you know he gave me a bie enough dose? Or if he didn't want me to come back and have it done the other way, so he'd get more? And that's what it will have to be. Only I'm not going to him." Seeing how she was, fiery and sullen, though weakened, and wanting nobody near, I let her be and went to my room. Kayo Obermark had the room between us, and of course he was on to what was happening; in spite of Mimi's efforts to keep him out, how could he miss? He was young, about my own age of twenty-two, but ponderous already, a big, important, impatient face, irritable, smoky with thought that went out far. He was gloomy and rough. His life was rugged in there, that room; he didn't like classes, his notion being that he could do all his own learning; the room was foul from the moldering of old things and smelled of bottles he used for urine, because he didn't like to make trips to the toilet when he was working. He lived halfnaked in his bed, which all the rest of the room approached, heaped up with commodities and dirt. He was melancholy and brilliant. He thought the greatest purity was outside human relations, that those only begot lies and cabbage-familiarity, and he told me, "I prefer stones any time. I could be a geologist. I'm not even disappointed in humankind, I just don't care about it, and if there's one thing that's sure, it's that this world is certainly not enough, and if there isn't any more they can have it all back." Kayo wanted to know about Mimi although she always baited him. "What's the matter, she having it rough? She has hard luck." "Yes, it's bad." "But nah! it's not all luck," he said--one of the things he couldn't stand was that you should agree with him. "You notice people have the same kind of thing happen to them, over and over and over." His attitude to her had something in common with the doctor's; it was woman's trouble she had, and neither of them could place it very high. Kayo, however was a much more intelligent man than the doctor, and though as he stood in my room on bare weight-flattened feet in undershirt, the hair in tufts on his shoulders, and that large face from which everyone was reproached for letting him down and coming short tlle "wk--though, in other words, he was the hard figure of prej259 udice, there was still in him an extra effort of justice, a channel kept open. "Well--you understand. Everyone has bitterness in his chosen thine. Bitterness in his chosen thing. That's what Christ was for, that even God had to have bitterness in his chosen thing if