The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [203]
easy to man that bird. But I'm thrilled to try. Besides, we can live cheaper in Mexico." "But what about the money you're spending now? In this suite?" "Smitty pays all the expenses until the divorce is final. That doesn't matter to you, does it?" "No, but you ought to take it easier, not put out all this gold." "Why?" she said, and genuinely didn't understand. Any more than I could understand some of her notions about spending. She would pay thirty dollars for a pair of French sewing scissors in a silver shop on Michigan Boulevard--one big dead sizzle of trousseau silver--and those scissors would never cut a thread or snip a button, but disappear into the flow of articles in the bags and boxes, in the rear of the station wagon, and perhaps never show up again. Yet she could talk about being thrifty in Mexico.; "You don't mind spending Smitty's money, do you?" "No," I said, and truthfully I scarcely cared. "But suppose I wasn't going to Mexico with you--would you have gone on alone? With the bird, and so on?" "Of course. Don't you want to come with me, though?" She knew, however, that I could no more stay here and let her go than I could put out my eyes. Even if it was African vultures, condors, rocs, or phoenixes. She had the initiative and carried me; if I had had a different, independent idea I might have tried to take the lead instead. But I had none. So she asked me whether I didn't want to stay behind, and then seeing it all over my face how I loved her she took back her question and was silent; the only sound was the strike of the guitar as it was set down. Then she said, "If the bird worries you, just forget about it till you see it. I'll show you what to do. Only don't think about it beforehand. Or think what a kick there may be in it when you get the animal trained, and how beautiful it is." I tried to take her advice, but all the same my bottom skepticism of West-Side Chicago nagged after me and asked, "Nah, what is this!" And since we were only a short distance from the zoo I took a walk to see their eagle, who perched on a trunk inside a cage forty feet high and conical like the cage of a parlor parrot, in its smoke and gun colors dipped somewhat with green, and its biped stance and Turkish or Janissary pants of feathers--the pressed-down head, the killing eye, the deep life of its feathers. Oy! In the old-country park green of lawns and verdigris-covered ironwork, ordinary tree shade and garden sunlight, there seemed nothing a bird like this might want. I thought, How could anybody ever tame him? And also, We'd better make speed for Texarkana and start with this thing before it grows too big. The letter from Smith's lawyer had arrived. The day we received it we loaded up the wagon and left the city, heading toward St. Louis. As we started late we didn't quite make it that far. We camped, sleeping on the ground under a shelter-half. I figured we weren't too far from the Mississippi, which I was eager to see. I was terribly excited. We lay beside a huge tree. Such a centuries' old trunk still had such small-change of foliage--it was difficult to think this enormous thing should live merely by these tiny leaves. And soon you distinguished the sound of the leaves, moved by the air, from the insects' sound. First near and loud; then farther and mountainous. And then you realized that wherever it was dark there was this sound of insects, continental and hemispheric, again and again, like surf, and continuous and dense as stars.
CHAPTER XV
What class we started out in! We were risen up high with pleasure. We had all the luck in love we could ask, and it was maybe improved by the foreignness we found in each other, for in some ways Danae or Flora the Belle Romaine couldn't have been Stranger to me, while only God can guess what sort of oddity out of barbarous Chicago I was to her. But these differences I think reduced the weight of precious personality and the -veteran burden that familiarity is always a part of. The way we set out and all that we did or saw, what we ate, under what trees we took off our clothes