The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [171]
at home." "Well, he had to go to the West Side sometimes, and when he did he had a transfer good for the Sixteenth-Street Kenton streetcar, so he used it." "Don't be so rough on him, Jimmy." "I'm not against him. I'd be happy if it did him good, but he stayed the same. He's the same now." "And how's Eleanor? She went to Mexico, I heard." "Oh, you're out of date. That was a long time ago. She's been back a good while. You should visit her. You was her favorite in the old davs, and she still talks about you. Eleanor has a big heart. I wish she was better." "She sick?" "She was. She's working again, at Zarropick's on Chicago Avenue where they make the suckers they sell in the stores next-door to schools. She shouldn't be working though. She got sick in Mexico." "I thought she was going there to marry." "Oh, you remember?" "Your Spanish relative." He smiled downward. "Yeah. Well, he runs a sweatshop of leather poods, and he had Eleanor working in it for about a year while they were supposed to be engaged. But he was laying the other broads workins, there too, and he wasn't really thinking of getting married. Finally she got sick and came home. She's not heartbroken; it was great to see another country." "I'm sorry for Eleanor." "Yeah, she hoped to be in love. She banked a lot on it." He was contemptuous beyond measure, not toward Eleanor for whom he happened to care a lot. No, perhaps for her sake, toward love, as to something that had undermined and debilitated her. "You're kind of hard on it." "I don't think anything of it." "But you're married, Clem told me."' This innocence of mine pleased him. "That's right, and have a son. He's a winner." "And your wife?" "Oh, she's a good kid. She has sort of a hard life. We live with her folks, we have to. And there's another married sister and brother-inlaw. Well, what do you think it's like, with fights about who's going to use the toilet or take down the wash, or cook, or yell at the kid? There's still another sister who's a tramp and spreads on the stairs, so you can step on her in the dark coming home from the show, so there's brawls all the time. What I get out of it is space in a double bed. Don't you know how it is by now? It's all that you want from life comes to you as one single thing--f----; so you and some nice kid get together, and after a while you have more misery than before, only now it smore permanent. You're married and have a kid." "Is that how it happened to you?" "I fooled around with her, I got her in the family way, and I married her." The path of wretchedness as Mrs. Renling had drawn it for me when she predicted what would happen if Simon married Cissy. "You're set up like the July fourth rocket," said Jimmy. "Just charge enough to explode you. Up. Then the stick falls down after the flash. You live to bring up the kid and oblige your wife." "Is that what you do?" "Well, it's not much to me; I give up on that. I don't think I give her much of a bang. But what are we talking about me for? You're the wonder boy. And what the hell are you doing, or think you're doing? I died when I saw you glom onto those books. That's a fine way to meet again. Augie, a crook!" It was not all dismay; in part he seemed glad of it. "Not a full-time crook, Jim." "But even part-time it doesn't go with what I've heard about you and Simon, that you're so successful." "He's doing fine--married and in business."; "That's what I heard from Kreindl. And you was going to the university. Is that why you were copping books? We catch a lot of students. Most of them don't make a good impression." I explained to him my need for money, letting him assume that I was Mimi's lover, for otherwise it would have been difficult to make him understand; and though it was curious to meet Jimmy as the cop that caught me, and I felt light with relief and one foot on paradox and all the spirited melancholy that came of that, I had to get on with my money-raising and the other things there were to attend to. However, Jimmy was aroused by what I told him, and his eyes and all the skin of his face expanded with