The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [178]
looks seem negligible; and I wasn't willing to be tagged for lascivious crime and false pretenses or whatever the counts were that they thought they had against me. By no means nervous, therefore, I judged that I had to do only with Lucy, no fortune hunting now involved, for I could go any distance independent of brothers, relations, and all, provided that her impulse was a true one and she was, as she had always said, in love. This was the thing, for I saw that she had been worked on, though I didn't know how much she had been told. The iarge-mouthed smile she gave me, staying at her seateddistance instead of coming to kiss me, was curious--that pretty sketch ^_of charm, in lipstick, widening, the relative of the awful cleft, running ^|thc other way, of the schismatics in the sixth bulge of hell, hit open from the bottom and split through the face. Ah, dear face! treasured as the representative of all the body which, though, dies away from this top delegate when it becomes too gorged and valuable. She, now so unearnest with me through her worked-up countenance, I saw she had been gotten to by her parents and that decisions had been made. My only cue was to leave. But not a single word had been spoken yet in this oriental assembly, and I had no pretext. I was still the escort, dolled up, if you didn't scrutinize me too close, like a chorus boy, in a boiled shirt, and thinking of nothing but courtship and dances. "Why don't you sit down?" said Mrs. Magnus. 'I thought we were leaving right away." "Well, Lucy!" said her father. And on this signal she told me, "I'm not going with you, Augie." "Now or ever," he directed. "Never again.".. ' "You'll go to the dance with Sam." "But I came to take her, Mr. Magnus." "No, these things when you decide to break them, it's better to break at once," said Mrs. Magnus. "I'm sorry, Augie. I personally don't wish you any bad luck. But I advise you to control yourself. It's not too late, You're a handsome and intelligent young man. There's nothing against your family; I respect your brother. But you're not what we had in mind for Lucy." "What about what Lucy had in mind?" I said with a rising throatful of rage. The old man was impatient with Mrs. Magnus's effort toward queenly dignity and wisdom. "No dough if she marries you!" he said. "Well, Lucy, to whom does that make the difference, to you or to me?" Her smile spread wider and lost all other intentions in the single suggestion that it was she who had inflamed me and when hot I had discharged it all upon someone else but that it really didn't matter since she wasn't so little her father's child, though a girl, that all that ardor in the car and in the parlor and with the lips and tongues and fingertips and the rest could make her really lose her head and be unwise. I couldn't be sure just what the deal was. Something was said about the damage to her car. Now she confessed it. Her father said of course it would be fixed. As long as nothing else was broken, this being his delicacy about the hymen. But it was worth a laugh to him; this way a threat and groan also escaping in his fatherly joy that she had remained intact. There was nothing further to stay for. I was threatened by her brother Sam, whom I found near me when I picked up my coat in the hall, that he would break my back if I bothered his sister; but with all his thickset hairiness and spreading keister, he couldn't make it mean anything to me. I started the car, to which I also felt commitment ending, and drove to the hospital. Padilla had given Mimi blood, and he was lying down after the transfusion in the room where I had left him, sucking an orange; his skimpy arm with its one curious ball of muscle taped, and his eyes, below surface indifference, black and active toward what I couldn't readily see. "How is Mimi?" "They took her'upstairs. She's still off her head, but this Castleman says he gives her a good chance." "I'm going up to see her. How is it with you?" "Well, I don't think I'll be sticking around now. I'll be going home soon. Are you staying?" I gave him the cab fare,