The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [195]
How would this will of mine have got there to lead the way? I couldn't just order myself to become one of those people who do go out before the rest, who stand and intercept the big social ray, or collect and concentrate it like burning glass, who glow and dazzle and make bursts of fire. It wasn't what I was meant to be. As I ran into Thea's apartment house from the cab and rang the ball three times, fast, I didn't especially observe where I had come. It was a showy, heavily furnished lobby, no one in it, and as I was trying to find out which of the elegant doors belonged to the elevator, a square of light appeared in one of them. Thea had come down for me. The door opened. There was a velvet bench and we sank down on it, pressing and kissing as the smooth elevator rose. Not noticing the blood-stiffened shirt, she passed her hand over my chest and up to my shoulders. I opened her housecoat on her breasts. I was not in control of my head. I was unaware, nearly blind. If anyone else had been near neither of us would have known it. I can't for certain say I don't remember a face, maybe that of a maid when the door opened, and we went on embracing in the corridor and then in the apartment, by the door, on the carpet. With Thea it wasn't at all as it had been with other women, those who gave you their permission, so to speak, to undo one thing at a time and admire it, the next thing guarded again, and the last thing most guarded of all. She didn't delay, or seem to hurry either. As if studying deeply from a surrendered mind, and with the lips, the hands and hair, the rising bosom and legs, without the use of any force, presently it seemed as if an exchange or transfer had happened of us both into still another person who hadn't existed before. There was a powerful feeling of love. And so finally, as if I had been on my bent knees in what's supposed to be an entirely opposite spirit, praying, with my fingers pressed together, I think it would have been no different from what I felt come over me with the fingers not together but touching her on the breasts instead. My bursting face with the swatted eye lay between, and her arms were around my neck. Now the sun began to heat us by the door, on the rug where we were lying. It had the same filmy whiteness as it had in the linen room. It had shone dirtier on the Loop sidewalk where I jumped from the streetcar. Here it glowed white once more. Presently I wanted to pull the curtain because of the glare on my eye, and when I stood up she observed for the first time how I looked. "Who did that to you?" she cried. I explained the whole business to her, and she kept saying, "Is that why you didn't come? Is that what you were doing all that time?" The time lost was the most important thing of all to her. Although it gave her a tremor to look straight at my bruise, the specific reason for my being beaten didn't interest her and she wasn't very curious about it. Yes, she had heard of the big union drive, but that I was in it was sort of irrelevant. For while I was not with her, where I was intended to be, it didn't make much difference where I was. All intervening things and interferences were of the same unreal kind and belongedout there. Gauze-winders, hotel workers on strike, errors like my illusion about her sister, that farce of being taken for Mrs. Renling's gigolo, all that Thea had herself done meanwhile, these were entirely "out there." The reality was now, and in here; she had followed it by instinct since St. Joe. So this was the reason for the cry of all that time lost and it made me feel what her fear was like of never succeeding in finding her way from the "out there" but blundering forever. Of course I didn't grasp this right away. It came out during the next few days, during which we stayed in the apartment. We slept and woke, and we didn't really discuss my doings or hers. Suitcases were standing around the bed, but I didn't ask about them. It was just as change from the delivery men and also checks and so forth in the refrigerator. The money was mixed up with rotting salad