The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [277]
rods, I am ashamed to say. Well, he wanted to buy it right off, so we went to his house where he gave me a check for one hundred and eighty dollars on the Continental Illinois. But then he wouldn't let me get out of the house. Jokingly he said I should let him win back some of his money at poker. His wife played too. Obviously they were going to try to strip me. Kayo had to sit in on the game as well, so it would look friendly. It was really an attempted swindle. We sat at the circular table by the stove with a pot of coffee and condensed milk and played far into the night. The workbench with its busted radios was right there in the large kitchen. The husband got angry at the wife because she lost. If she had won they'd have won double, but since she lost he swore at her and she screamed at him. Kayo lost too. I was the only winner and would rather not have been. In fact I refunded Kayo's money on the way home. But then the brother-in-law stopped the check two days later, and I had to come and fetch the car, for it wouldn't run. There was an angry scene. And Kayo was very put out and wouldn't talk much to me at school for a time, though he eventually thawed out. I guess I really shouldn't have sold the car without telling of the bent rods. Sophie Geratis, my friend of hotel-organizer days, was married now but wanted to divorce her husband and marry me. She told me he had a vice with other men and didn't pay attention to her at all. He gave her charge accounts and a car but he wanted her only as window dressing. His business was to sell a product to greenhouses, and this certain product was a monopoly, so his life was easy and he was chauffeured every day in his homburg hat and gloves around the hothouse belt of the city. Therefore Sophie spent a lot of time with me, fixing up my room at Owens' as it had never been fixed up before. She wondered that I would sleep on a pillow without a pillowcase, and she brought over several. "You're stingy," she told me. "You're not just sloppy, you appreciate good things." She was right. Sophie was very intelligent, never mind that she had been a chambermaid. About some things I was tight. When I went into a good bar or club I would feel my pocket and worry about the check. Naturally she knew this. "But also I know that you give your dough away if somebody touches you the right way. That's not good either. And there's that car of yours, but that's just plain dumbness. You were a knucklehead to buy it." With her floating wide gaze, brown and slow, Sophie was very pretty. In addition to which, as I've said, she had gifts of the mind, though she was inclined to use them in a scornful way. She wouldn't use the fancy charge accounts her husband gave her. Wearing a hat of Polish flowers she had bought at Goldblatt's she would wash her things in my sink. She was in her slip and smoked a cigarette. The paradoxical part is that she was a very tender person, she was good to me, and not just because she needed me but somehow just the reverse, because I needed her. However, I wasn't prepared to marry. "We'd get along fine if I fitted in more with your ambitions," she said. "I'm all right for bed, but not to marry. When that other girl came to fetch you, you dropped me in a second. You probably would be ashamed of me. You have the most use for me when you're feeling weak or low. I know you. Nothing is ever good enough for you to stick to. Your old man must have been some aristocrat bastard." "I doubt it. My brother says he drove a truck for a laundry on Marshfield. I never thought that he was a hotshot. Besides, he found my mother working in a Wells Street loft." "You don't really want me, do you?" Well, she meant why wasn't I going to set my feet on a path of life and stop looking over the field. Why, there was nothing that I longed for more than that. Let it come! Let there be consummation, and superfluity be finished from the next drop of the pendulum onward! Let the necessity for the mystical great things of life, which, not satisfied, lives in us as the father of secret miseries, be fulfilled and