The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [278]
have a chance to show it's not the devil himself. Did Sophie think I didn't want to have a wife, and sons and daughters, or be busy at my appropriate daily work? I stood up then and there and told her how entirely wrong she was about me. "What are we waiting for?" she said, glad. "Let's start! I'll be a good -wife to you, you know I will. I need to begin too." Then I got red and embarrassed, and my tongue wouldn't move. "See?" she said with sad frankness and wide, shadowed, rouged mouth while the electric light shone down on her clear bare shoulders. "I ain't good enough. Well, who is?" I wasn't marrying just yet, that was what I said. But what Sophie had to tell me was what my Cossack pal also had meant, that time he hurt my pride. What he had really meant to say to me, as I sensed infallibly and right off, was that I couldn't be hurt enough by the fate of other people. He should have known, as he himself was wandering from here to there, and what should he be kicking around for, from Moscow to Turkestan, to Arabia, to Paris, Singapore? Nobody gets out of these pains like a pilgrim, looking at temples and docks and smoking cigarettes past the bone heaps of history and over many times digested soil, there where people stayed at home and caught it in the neck. So Sophie's face, which was maturer now than the pretty face in the union office that I had first seen, was hurt. But she didn't quit me this time as when, after Thea knocked at the door, she suddenly had covered the backs of her thighs. By now she knew, I reckon, how much disappointment is in the taste of existence. But I didn't wish to marry her. She would have scolded me for my own good too much, I thought. So this one more soul I would fly by, that wanted something from me. "You're waiting for that girl," she said with envy, wrongly. I said, "No, I'll never see her again." Nevertheless I was getting somewhere, you mustn't go entirely by appearances. I was coming to some particularly important conclusions. In fact I was lying on my couch in the state of grand summary one afternoon, still in my bathrobe and having called off all duties in the inspiration of the day, when Clem Tambow arrived, full of an idea of his own. I don't believe Clem had many of the vices that lead to damnation, but such as they were they were very evident on this occasion--late rising, puffiness, double-breasted slovenliness of the kind that old gentleman La Bruyere thought so sordid, tobacco stink, lint, and cat hairs on him, kept up by dime-store purchase and cheap accommodation, as in aftershave lotion, Sta-comb, artificial silk socks, and so forth, besides his lordly self-abuse look. Be that as it might, he had been lying in bed too this solemn brown Chicago day and working also on a scheme. He was going out into professional life. As soon as he got his psychology degree in the winter he aimed to get an office in one of the older skyscrapers on Dearborn near Jackson and set up as a vocationalguidance counselor. "You?" I said. "You never did a day's work in your life!" "That's what makes me so ideal," he answered, ready for me. "I'm relaxed. No bunk, Augie. You remember Benny Fry from the poolroom? He's cleaning up. He does marriage counseling too, and gives rabbit tests." "If it's the same guy I'm thinking of, the one who wore the elevator shoes, didn't they have him in court last month for a phony?" "Yes, but we can do the same thing legitimately." "I don't want to throw cold water," I said, still full of my own experience. "But how will you get clients?" "Oh, that's no problem. Do people seem to you to know what they want? They beg you to tell them. So we'll be the experts they come to." "Oh no, Clem. Not 'we.' " "Augie, I want you to come into this with me. I don't like to go into things by myself. I'll give the aptitude tests and you do the interviews. With the new Rogers nondirective technique you let them do the talking anyway. There's nothing to it. Listen here, you can't go on from one screwball job to another." "I know, but Clem, something has just happened to me today." "You're