The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [90]
So for the same desires to meet was a freak occurrence. And to feel them so specific, settled on one person, maybe was an unallowable presumption, too pure,, too special, and a misunderstanding of the real condition of things.; When I walked in to have breakfast with Mrs. Renling next moming I left the door open. "What, were you born in the coal scuttle?" she said. "Close it. I'm lying here." And when I went, halfhearted, to do it, she observed how wrinkled I looked. "Go down to the tailor after breakfast and get pressed. You must have slept in your pants. I make allowance for you because you're in love, even the way you were so courteous to me last night. But you don't have to be a tramp." After breakfast she took off for her mineral bath and I went down I to the lobby. The Fenchels had checked out. There was a note at the desk for me from Thea. "Esther told uncle about you, and we are going to Waukesha for a few days and then East. You were foolish last night. Think about it. It's true I love you. You'll see me again." Then I had a few rough days and got stretched out in melancholy. I thought, where did I get that way, putting in for the best there was in the departments of beauty and joy as if I were a count of happy youth, and like born to elegance and sweet love, with bones made of candy? And had to remember what very seldom mattered with me, namely, where I came from, parentage, and other history, things I had never much thought of as difficulties, being democratic in temperament, available to everybody and assuming about others what I assumed about myself. And in the meantime, more and more, I had to carry what till now had carried me. This place, for instance, the Merritt, cream and gold, was now on my neck--the service, the dinner music, the dances; the hyperbolical flowers all of a sudden like painted iron; the chichi a millstone; and, on top of it, Mrs. Renling and her foundry-cast weight. I couldn't take her now when she was difficult. There was bad luck even in the weather, which turned cool and rainy toward the last; and rather than stay in where she could lay hands on me and carry on and tyrannize, I stuck around the amusement park at Silver Beach, where the seats of the Ferris wheel were covered, getting blackened, and I got soaked through my raincoat (from the old times and not up to my recenter elegance). I sat in the hot-dog stands among the carnies, con^cessionaires, and shell-game operators, waiting for the course of baths to finish. Near the end of the holiday Simon wrote that he was coming to St. Joe with a girl friend, and he had luck with the weather. I was on the pier when the white steamer tied up. All the blue and green was fresher from the rains, and the cold of the wet days was down to a pin core. As for the people debarking, the hard use of the city was on them; it had come off only a little during this four-hour excursion on the water. Families, single men, working girls in pairs bringing their beach and summer things, some not so visibly encumbered but heavily loaded all the same. Tough or injured, according to their lot or nature. Off the ship they tramped, over the motor-driven edge of water and into the peaceful swale of brightness, and here and there the light picked out a specialized or warily happy face; and also illuminated were silks, hairs, brows, straws, breasts come to breathe out charges of nerves or let rise the driven-down simplicities, bearers of things as old as the most ancient of cities and older; desires and avoidances bred into bellies, shoulders, legs, as long ago as Eden and the Fall. Taller than most, blond and brown, there was my Germanic-looking brother. He was dolled up like a Fourth of July sport, and a little like a smart gypsy, smiling, his chipped tooth foremost, his double-breasted plaid jacket open wide, knuckles down on the handles of two grips. He gave off his fairness with a kind of heat in the blue color of his eyes, terrifically; it was also in his cheeks, down into his neck, rich and animal. He walked heavy in balance, in his pointed shoes over the gangplank,