The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [286]
Bay to go into training there. Next time I saw Simon I ran into him on Randolph Street and he didn't behave as usual. "Let's go in and have a bite," he said, for we were in front of Henrici's and they had a vat of out-of-season strawberries in the window. The waiters knew him but he hardly even answered when they spoke to him, instead of being proud, as would have been normal. When we sat down and he lifted off his hat, the whiteness of his face gave me a start. I said, "What's the matter--what goes on?" "Renee tried to commit suicide last night," he said. "She took sleeping pills. I got there as she was passing out, I shook her and slapped her, I made her walk, threw her in a cold bath until the doctor got there-- and she's alive. She'll be all right." "Was it a real attempt? Did she mean business?" "The doctor said she wasn't really in danger. Maybe she didn't know how many pills to take." "That doesn't sound likely to me." l "Me neither. She must have been faking. She is a counterfeiter. It- wasn't the first time by a long shot." I got a glimpse of struggles that probably could never make sense. It afflicted me. "People will act themselves into something at last though," he went on. "They get carried away." And he said, "If it's for pleasure you pay a steep price, okay. But suppose it's a price for no_pleasure. Only trying to have it. Wanting pleasure. You pay for what you want, not always what you get. That's what a price means. Otherwise where's the price? The payment is in something you're liable to run short on." "I wish I knew of anything I could do." "You could shove me in front of a train," he said. He began to tell me what had happened. Charlotte had found out about Renee. "I think she knew for a long time," he said, "but I guess she wanted to wait." It would have been surprising if Charlotte hadn't known. Information and thoughts about Simon were streaming through her mind all the time. Everybody knew him in the downtown district. The waiter who brought the strawberries in the pewter dishes said, "Here you are, Mr. March." Renee was with Simon all the time too, and they were continually playing with the chance of discovery. Why did she drive him almost to the door? One day after she left I picked up a gold comb from the floor of the car, and he said, "Damn her, she's too careless," and put it in his pocket. Now it couldn't be that during two years Charlotte hadn't found anything--no gold hairs, no hankies, no matches in the glove compartment from salons she didn't go to; or that she couldn't read in Simon's husbandly home-coming with hat and evening paper, kiss of the cheek or married joke on the backside, that only five minutes before, in only the time it took to park the car and ride up in the elevator, he had been with another woman. She certainly must have. I figure that for a while she'd have said to herself, "What I don't see with my own eyes won't hurt me"--this not quite deliberate blindness but the tight grasp of people who devise very deeply. Somebody wrestling a bear for dear life, and with forehead lost against the grizzly pelt, figuring anyway what to do next Sunday, whom to invite to dinner and how to fix the table. But with Charlotte you never could tell. She perhaps understood that with a lot of noise she'd drive him to be rash, because of romantic honor, and she therefore was cautious with him. Once she explained to me, "Your brother needs money, a whole lot of money. If he didn't have it to spend, as much as he needed, he'd die." This astounded me when I heard it--on a hot morning it was, in the sunny, barbaric-carpeted skyscraper living room and its vases, hot breezes that blew the plants, and she herself a large figure in a white satin coat and with a cigarette holder in her rouged mouth but looking as severe as any Magnus, any of her uncles or cousins. She was as good as telling me that she was saving Simon's life. But he did need dough. Renee lived in the same style as Charlotte. He had a feeling that that was right; also he owed it to himself not to try to do things cheaply. When he and