The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [200]
while we held over in Chicago a few days longer; she was waiting for a letter from Smitty's--her husband's--lawyer and used the time to give me lessons with the guns in the woods off toward the Wisconsin line. When we came home and she took off her breeches and sat in her out-of-doors shirt with bare legs, she might take up a piece of costume jewelry to fix the clasp and sit like a girl of ten, in a rapt way, her neck bent and knees up, her fingers kind of clumsy. Then we'd ride on the Lincoln Park bridle path, and there was nothing clumsy about her there. I hadn't forgotten how to manage a horse since my Evanston days. But that was what it was, managing rather than riding. I followed her speed as fast as I could, red in the face and hitting the saddle hard, using my weight against the animal. I managed to stay on, but how I did it amused her. I was amused, too, when I caught my breath and climbed down from the saddle, but asked myself just how many new adaptations I was going to have to try to make. Along with the snapshots of the Rattlesnake Club I saw others; she had a leather case full of them. Some were of that very summer in St. Joe when I met her, of her uncle and aunt, her sister Esther and sports in white pants with tennis rackets and paddling canoes. When she showed me Esther's picture it didn't touch me except through her resemblance to Thea. There were photos also of her parents. Her mother had been a lover of the Pueblos, so there she was, sitting in a touring car in a hat and furs, looking at the cliffs. One picture in particular took my attention. It was of her father in a rikshaw. He wore a white drill suit and a helmet with a nipple, his eyes also whitish, the influence of the sun whose spottiness made the wheels seem like tea-soaked lemon. He looked over the shaved head of 3;0 the Chinese human horse who stood with thick wide calves between the shafts. Then there were more pictures of hunting. Some of Thea with different falcons on her gloved arm. Several of Smitty, her husband. In ridin" pants. At play, wrangling with a dog. Or again with Thea in a night club--she laughed with eyes closed in the flash of the bulb and he covered his bald head with slender fingers while an entertainer flung arms out over the table. Many of these things troubled me. For instance, in her laughter at the night club I saw the bosom, shoulder, chin, with kind of a happy recognition, but the hands of ridicule and squawk of limelight laughter--no, those were foreign. There was no place for me, there, by the table. Nor by her father in the rikshaw. Nor by the mother in the touring car with the fur about her neck. And then the hunting troubled me. I didn't know how earnestly I was to take it. Banging at crows, fine, that was okay. But when she bought me a gauntlet so I could handle the eagle, and I put it on, a strange sense came over me as if I were a fielder in a demons' game and would have to gallop here and there and catch burning stone in the air. So I was very uncertain. Not as to whether I should go with her, which was no decision since I had to, but as to what to expect, what I'd have to go through or put up as my share, where we were headed. To explain it sensibly to anyone was more than I was capable of. I tried. Mimi, who should have been the one best able to sympathize, was just the friend with whom I had most awkwardness about it. She didn't like it a bit and said, "Now what are you trying to tell me?'* unwilling to believe I was, as I said, in love, and the skin of her fore[ head thickened and drew along her upshot brows. As I explained in more detail she laughed in my face. "What, what, what! You have an eagle to pick up in Arkansas? An eagle? Don't you mean a buzzard?" From loyalty to Thea I didn't laugh; Mimi couldn't get me to, even if the queerness of the expedition worried me plenty. "Where did you find a babe like this?" "Mimi, I love her." This made her take another, nearer look at me, which showed me to be in earnest. And Mimi thought so much of the seriousness of love she doubted there were many who could