The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [204]
and what protocol there was about kissing, from the face to the legs and back again up to the breasts, what we agreed and disagreed about, or what animals or people came our way I can always, recall when I want to. Some things I have an ability to see without feeling much previous history, almost like birds or dogs that have no human condition but are always living in the same age, the same at Charlemagne's feet as on a Missouri scow or in a Chicago junkyard. And often that is how the trees, water, roads, grasses may come back in their green, white, blue, steepness, spots, wrinkles, veins, or smell, so that I can fix my memory down to an ant in the folds of bark or fat in a piece of meat or colored thread on the collar of a blouse. Or such discriminations as where, on a bush of roses, you see variations in heats that make your breast and bowel draw at various places from your trying to correspond; when even the rose of rot and wrong makes you attempt to answer and want to stir. Which is to say also that the human heat that circulates and warms, when it's piled at any bar or break, burns inward or out with typical embers or sores, and makes a track of fever or fire whose corresponding part is darkness and cold gaps. So there are burning roses, there are sores, and there are busted circuits. It's rare to find us without these breaks and interferences. Thea and I had our troubles. She kept me uncertain, as I did her. I'd do it by looking, through long old habit, casual and unattached; it was hard for me to change. And on her side, she couldn't make me any promises. She just wouldn't. I knew that Smitty wouldn't have divorced her because of one single naval cadet. I figured in those high-up social circles a falling-off here and there was not of such importance. When I took it up with her she admitted it. "Of course," she said, "now and then. Because of Smitty. Well--also because of myself. But we don't have to think about that. Because nothing like you has ever happened to me. So what do I know about far in the future? I've never been this way before. Have you?" "No." "Why," she said, exactly right, "this makes you jealous! Why, Augie, the others would be jealous of you. They should be. Those just were incidents. You know, this can be one of the most unimportant things in the world. If it's good, why grudge anybody? And if it's bad you can only feel sorry. And can you blame me if I tried? And don't you want me to tell you the truth?" "Oh! Yes, I do. No. I'm not sure. Maybe not." "Suppose I hadn't looked--what would I know? And if I can't tell you the truth, and you can't tell me..." Yes, yes, I knew the truth had to be appropriate somewhere, but was this the place for it? She wanted to say and to know all. Pale as she was, she got paler at the approach of this desire to say and know, and often her seriousness was right on the border of panic. For of course she was jealous too. Yes, she was jealous. It did me good sometimes to realize it. She wanted to be hard about the truth, and when she was she shook and got frightened. Sometimes I reckoned that mere jealousy of her sister had interested her in me in the first place. It wasn't a reassuring thought. But then it's actually very common that at the outset you desire a thing for the wrong reasons; there's an even more deep desire which will bring you out of such reasons. Otherwise there'd never be any human motives but miserable, green ones, and only the illusion of better and riper. Rather than as the history of the world shows, that inferior reasons are not the only leading ones. Because why have unhappy people persisted in thinking of the best, and the best only? You take that poor Rousseau, in the picture he leaves of himself, stubble-faced and milky, in a rope wig, while he wept at his own opera performed at court for the monarch, how he was encouraged by the weeping of the hearttouched ladies and fancied he'd like to gobble the tears from their cheeks--this sheer horse's ass of a Jean-Jacques who couldn't get on with a single human being, goes away to the woods of Montmorency