The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [327]
he could do only by making himself abstract like this. I started to cough. I had a long coughing fit. Shall I explain why? Because many years ago when I was a kid and went to have my tonsils out I began to cry when the ether mask was put on me. A nurse said, "Is he crying, a big boy like that?" And another answered, "Why, no, he's brave. He's not crying, he's coughing." And when I heard that I started to cough in earnest. This is the kind of coughing it was, of great distress. It stopped the conversation. The maitre d'hotel came to see what was the matter and gave me a glass of water. Lord! How much of this did Simon have to hear? If she didn't stop she'd turn him into stone. He'd have turned into stone long ago if it hadn't been for these Renees. What are you supposed to do, lay down your life? That's what she wanted from him and what she meant by "right." Sheer murder. If she meant that you have to die anyway and might as well do it sooner than later, it's criminal iriurder. He was ashamed, stony with shame. His secrets were being told. His secrets! What did they amount to? You'd think they were as towering as the Himalayas. But all they were about was his mismanaged effort to live. To live and not die. And this was what he had to be ashamed of. "You'd better do something for that cold," said Charlotte severely. I love my brother very much. I never meet him again without the utmost love filling me up. He has it too, though we both seem to fight it. "It sounds like the old whooping cough you used to have," Simon said and looked toward me once again. Just then I thought that the worst of it for him was not to have the child. I couldn't spend much time with Simon in Paris. Mintouchian cabled me to go to Bruges and look up a guy there who had a big nylon deal on his mind, and so I started out. I had Jacqueline the maid with me as passenger. She has folks in Normandy and was going to pay them a Christmas visit, and as she was bringing a couple of suitcases full of presents I gave her a lift. Jacqueline was referred to Stella by du Niveau. When he first knew her she was a waitress in Vichy just after the French defeat and he @ was on his way out of the country. They must have become friends, || and it is hard to conceive because she looks so grotesque. Though this - was some time back and then she might have been seeing the last of her best days. At the outer corners Jacqueline's eyes sink down queeriy. She has a large, crooked Norman nose, fair hair not in very good health, veiny temples, a long chin and a disciplinarian mouth that lipstick doesn't do a great deal to change. She is highly painted and has a sweet odor of cosmetics and cleaning fluid. Her manner is very busy. She pounds the floor very rapidly and hard as she walks, but she is a person of sweet temper, though gossipy and with all kinds of incomprehensible social ambitions. In addition to doing housework she also is employed as an ouvreuse, or usherette, in a movie, which is more of du Niveau's influence. Therefore she has a lot of social history to relate of the movie and the tough night life after closing time when she stops at the Coupole for a cup of coffee. She is always being offered violence, like holdup and rape, Arabs hitting her or trying to force their way into her room at night. Her hips are big and legs varicose for all that she moves so briskly, and this with her sharp face and breasts that have gone out of shape; and yet what is it that dismisses a person from desirability? I'm not the one to say. She has unkillable pride in her sensuality and adventurous spirit, and if she has these outrageous colors and parrot bite, what about it? It was a big holiday deal when we started out. She removed some stains from my camel's-hair coat with tea, which she claimed was just the thing, and then I carried her jammed cardboard valises with their tin locks down and stowed them in the trunk of the Citroen. It was cold; a hard cold with snowflakes. We circled the Etoile and roared off toward Rouen. I should have gone by way of Amiens, but it wasn't too much of a