The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [172]
concern and with the immediate determination he took. "How far gone is she?" "Over two months." "Listen, Augie, I'll help you as much as I can." "No, Jimmy," said I, surprised, "I couldn't tap you. I know you have it hard." "Don't be a dummy. Compare a few bucks to a life of grief. Say it's for my own sake--me not wanting to see it happen to anybody I used to be buddies with. How much do you need?" "About fifty bucks." "Easy. Between me and Eleanor it won't be anything. She has some dough put aside. I won't tell her what it's for. She wouldn't ask, but anyway why should she know? You don't have to te! l me why you don't nut the bee on your brother. You wouldn't be stealing it if he'd be willing to give it to you." "If push came to shove I might ask him, but there're special reasons why I can't. Well, Jim--thanks. It's great of you. Thanks, Jimmy!" The extent of my gratitude made him laugh at me. "Don't exaggerate. I'll see you here Monday, this same time, and give you the fifty bucks." Jimmy had no confidence that he could keep company with kind motives; he was abashed by them. And I understood well that he wanted to defeat a mechanism as much as he wanted to help a onetime friend. However that was, he gave me the money, and I made the appointment with the doctor for the end of Christmas week. Things were difficult to arrange. I had a date with Lucy that same night and couldn't break it with Simon's knowledge because I needed the car. Therefore, when I had left Mimi with the doctor I went down in great nervousness and phoned Lucy from a drugstore. "Honey, I'll have to be very late tonight," I told her. "Something's come up. It'll be ten o'clock before I can get to your place." She, however, had not much thought of me tonight. She whispered on the phone, "Darling, I ran into a fence and bent my fender. I haven't told Daddy. He's downstairs, so I'm stymied." "Oh, he won't be so angry." "But, Augie, I've had the car less than a month. He said he'd sell it I if I didn't take good care of it. I had to promise there wouldn't be any trouble for six months." "Maybe we can have it fixed without his knov/ing." "Do you think I could?" "Oh, probably. I'll dope out something. I'll be around late." "Not too late.". "Well, then, if I'm not there by ten, don't expect me." "In that case maybe I ought to get some sleep before New Year's Eve. You'll be on time tomorrow, won't you? And don't forget it's formal." "Tomorrow at nine, in my tuxedo, and maybe even this evening. Gut I promised to help out a friend who's having a little trouble. Don't worry about the car." "I do though. You don't know Daddy." Empty, I left the booth; feeling stiff, and the soldier of my fears, and a- tn'lt I didn't know had power over me. Stracciatella was closed, and in the gaunt glass curled saxophones and guitars shrunk in their sides. Deeper, cracks of goblin light out of the spaghetti-feasting kitchen where the family sat. I waited upstairs in the corridor by the door, which, in time, I heard unlocked. Mimi passed through it alone, handed out, and it shut before I could see the doctor to question him. I couldn't now, having to support Mimi, who tottered. She was only two days out of the hospital, and the variety of decisions she had made alone, not counting pain and blood loss, was enough to have taken away her strength. She was faint to such a degree that for the first time I saw her without expression, like a kid asleep on the excursion train, fatigued at night from picnicking. Except thai when her head rolled on my shoulder and approached my neck, she drew on the skin of it with her lips, weakly, a reflex of sensuality. For the moment perhaps I was Frazer and she was confirming that no matter what complication, injury, foulness, she didn't back down from her belief that all rested on the gentleness in privacy of man and woman--they did in willing desire what in the rock and water universe, the green universe, the bestial universe, was done from ignorant necessity. As we stood at the head of the stairs, her lips at my neck while I clasped her and whispered,