The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [244]
the poison she spoke of. And the animals and animal objects, the oxhide chairs, the straw-rustle snakes, the horned and shaggy heads, all that had seemed to have raison d'etre got dull, useless, brutal, or to be a jumble, a clutter merely, when something was wrong with her. While she herself looked tired, tendony in the neck, pinched on the shoulders. She- didn't even smell right. And up and down she was gripped by the most frightful jealousy; she wanted, and needed, to do me harm. For some reason I thought this would pass presently. But at the same time I trembled too. I said, "You can't even imagine that nothing happened, can you? And you have to assume that because we were together all night we made love too." "Well, maybe it is irrational," she said. "But whether it is or not, can you tell me it really didn't happen? Can you?" I was about, slowly, to do that, because it was necessary--and I felt monstrous to be putting up a lying face not having even washed Stella's odor from me--but Thea stopped me. She said, "No, don't, you'll only repeat the same thing. I know. And don't ask me to imagine anything. I already have imagined everything. Don't expect me to be superhuman. I won't try. It's too painful already, and a lot more than I thought I could stand." She didn't have any outburst of tears, but just like a sudden darkness, just that silent, they appeared in her eyes. That softened or melted all my hardness, as if by this quick heat. I said, "Let's quit this, Thea," and came toward her, but she moved away. "You should have stayed with her." "Listen--" "I mean it. You can be tender with me now. In ten minutes you could be with her, and fifteen minutes later with some other tramp. There isn't that much of you to go around. How did you get mixed up with this girl? That's what I want to know." "How? I met her with Oliver, through Moulton." "Why didn't she ask your friend Moulton then? Why you? Because you flirted with her." "No, because she picked me for someone sympathetic. She knew how I was with you, and she must have thought I'd understand a woman's situation faster than somebody else would." "That's just the kind of easy lie you often tell. She picked you because you look so damn obliging and she figured she could do what she wanted with you." "Oh no," I said, "you're wrong. She was just in a bad spot and I felt for her." But I remembered, of course, in the orange grove, that sensation of something that drew on me in a vital place and where I couldn't stop it. Apparently Thea knew something about this too, which amazed. me. Back in Chicago she had predicted that I'd go for another woman who ran after me. If only she hadn't described me to myself so mercilessly hard though. There, however, in Chicago, I thought how pleased I was I didn't have to have secrets from her; now there was a dusky sort of fluctuation back from this, as if it were fatal to be without hidden things. "I really and truly wanted to help her," I said. She cried, "What are you talking about--help! The man was picked up by the police just about as you were leaving." "Who, Oliver?" It stunned me. "Arrested? I guess I shouldn't have been in such a hurry. But I was afraid he'd drag her with him. Because he did have a gun, and he hit Louie Fu, he was getting to be violent, and I thought he'd force her--" "That foolish, weak, poor drunk moron--force her? That girl? What did he force before? She didn't lie in bed at the point of a gun, did she? She's a whore! But it didn't take her very long to see what you were like, that you'd be afraid to fall beneath her expectations, not be the man she wanted you to be, that you'd play her game. You play everyone's." "You're mad because I don't always play yours. Yes, I reckon she did understand me. She didn't tell me to do this. She asked me. She must have seen I was fed up with being told--" This made her look with intensified sickness at me, as if a new gust of it had hit her; she held her lip an instant with her teeth. Then she said, "It wasn't a game. I see you took it that way. Well, it wasn't, it was genuine.