The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [91]
arms drawn down by the weight of the valises, searching for me in the shade of the pier. I never saw him looking better than there, in the sun, rolling in with the crowd in his glad rags. When he clapped his arm around me I was happy to feel and smell him, and we grinned, mugged, pushed faces, with man's bristles under each other's fingers, and went through a rough, teasing grip. "Well, you jerk?" "And you, moneyman?" There wasn't any sting in this, though Simon had for a while been acting quiet toward me because I was earning more than he and cruising in luxury. "How's everybody--Mama?" "Well, the eyes, you know. But she's okay." And then he fetched up his girl--a big dark girl named Cissy Flexner. I had known her at school; she was from the neighborhood. Her father, before he went bust, had owned a drygoods store--overalls, laborers' canvas gloves and longjohns, galoshes, things like that; and he was a fleshy, diffident, pale, inside sort of man, back in his boxes. But she, although in a self-solicitous way, was a beautiful piece of tall work, on colossal but careful legs, hips forward; her mouth was big and would have been perfect if there hadn't been something selftasting in it, eyes with complicated lids but magnificent in their slow heaviness, an erotic development. So that she had to cast down these eyes a little to be decent with her endowment, that height of the bosom and form of hips and other generic riches, smooth and soft, that may take the early person, the little girl, by surprise in their ampleness when they come on. She accused me somewhat of examining her too much, but could anybody help that? And it was excusable on the further score that she might become my sister-in-law, for Simon was powerfully in love. He already was husbandly toward her, and they hung on each other with fondling and kissing and intimacy, strolling by the steep colors of water and air, while I swam by myself in the lake a little distance away. Also on the sand, when Simon, after he had rubbed his fine shield of chest hair, dried her back, he kissed it, and it gave me a moment's ache in the roof of the mouth, as if I had got the warm odor and touch of skin myself. She had so much, gave out so much splendor. As stupendous quiff. But personally I didn't care too much for her. Partly because I was gone on Esther. But also because what came across as her own, that is, apart from female brilliance, was slow. Maybe she herself was stupefied by what she had, her slaying weight. It must have pressed down on her thoughts, like any great vitality in nature. Like the aims that live; in the blood of grizzly or tiger, bearing down on the mind of such beasts with square weight, a manifestation of one thing carried out completely, to the very stripes and claws. But what about the privilege over that of being in the clasp of nature, and in on the mission of a species? The ingredient of thought was weaker in Cissy's mixture than the other elements. But she was a sly girl, soft though she seemed. And as she lay stretched on the sand, and the hot oil of popcorn and sharpness of mustard came in puffs, with crackling, from the stands of Silver Beach, she kept answering Simon, whom I couldn't hear-- he was on his sids next to'her in his red trunks--"Oh, fooey, no. What | bushwah! Love, shmuv!" But her pleasure was high. "I'm so glad you brought me, dear. So clean. It's heavenly here." I didn't like Simon's struggle with her--for that was what it was-- to convince her, sway her, work her around. Nearly everything he proposed she refused. "Let's not and say we did," and similar denials, i It led him into crudenesses I hadn't ever seen him in before, the way he laid himself out, dug, campaigned, swashed, flattered her, was gross. His tongue hung out with the heat of work and infatuation; and there was a bottom ground where he was angry, his anger rising straight into his face in two naming centers, under his eyes, on either side of his nose. I understood this, as we were covering the same field of difficulty and struggle in front of the identical Troy. This