Humboldt's Gift (7 page)

  “He’s a good friend to me, an old friend.”

  “Your weakness for your school chums isn’t to be believed. You have the
nostalgie de la boue
. Does he take you around to the whores?”

  I tried to give a dignified answer. But as a matter of fact I wanted the conflict to increase, and I provoked Denise. On the maid’s night out I once brought George home to dinner. Maid’s night out threw Denise into an anguish of spirit. Housework was insufferable. It killed her to have to cook. She wanted to go to a restaurant, but I said I didn’t feel like dining out. So at six o’clock, she hastily mixed ground meat with tomatoes, kidney beans, and chili powder. I said to George, “Share our chili con carne tonight. We can open a few bottles of beer.”

  Denise signaled me to come into the kitchen. She said, “I won’t have this.” She was warlike and shrill. Her voice was clear, thrilling, and minutely articulate—the rising arpeggios of hysteria.

  “Oh, come on. Denise, he can hear you.” I lowered my voice and said, “Let George have some of this chili con carne.”

  “There’s not enough. It’s just half a pound of hamburger. But that’s not the point. The point is I won’t serve him.”

  I laughed. Partly from embarrassment. I am normally a low baritone, almost basso profundo, but under certain kinds of provocation my voice disappears into the higher registers, perhaps into the bat range.

  “Listen to that screeching,” said Denise. “You give yourself away when you laugh like this. You were born in a coal scuttle. Brought up in a parrot-house.”

  Her great violet eyes were unyielding.

  “All right,” I said. I took George to the Pump Room. We ate shashlik brought in flaming by turbaned Moors.

  “I don’t want to interfere in your marriage, but I notice you’ve stopped breathing,” said George.

  George feels that he can speak for Nature. Nature, instinct, heart guide him. He is biocentric. To see him rub his large muscles, his Roman Ben Hur chest and arms with olive oil is a lesson in piety toward the organism. Concluding, he takes a long swig from the bottle. Olive oil is the sun and the ancient Mediterranean. Nothing is better for the bowels, the hair, the skin. He holds his own body in numinous esteem. He is a priest to the inside of his nose, his eyeballs, his feet. “You’re not getting enough air with that woman. You look as if you’re suffocating. Your tissues aren’t getting any oxygen. She’ll give you cancer.”

  “Oh,” I said. “She may think she’s offering me the blessings of an American marriage. Real Americans are supposed to suffer with their wives, and wives with husbands. Like Mr. and Mrs. Abraham Lincoln. It’s the classic US grief, and a child of immigrants like me ought to be grateful. For à Jew it’s a step up.”

  Yes, Denise would be overjoyed to hear of this atrocity. She had seen Renata speeding past in the silver Mercedes. “And you, the passenger,” said Denise, “getting to be as bald as a barber pole, even if you comb your side-hair over to hide it, and grinning. She’ll give you something to grin about, that fat broad.” From insult Denise went into prophecy. “Your mental life is going to dry out. You’re sacrificing it to your erotic needs (if that’s the term for what you have). After sex, what can you two talk about. . . ? Well, you wrote a few books, you wrote a famous play, and even that was half ghosted. You associated with people like Von Humboldt Fleisher. You took it into your head that you were some kind of artist.
We
know better, don’t we. And what you really want is to get rid of everybody, to tune out and be a law unto yourself. Just you and your misunderstood heart, Charlie. You couldn’t bear a serious relationship, that’s why you got rid of me and the children. Now you’ve got this tramp with the fat figure who wears no bra and shows her big nipples to the world. You’ve got ignorant kikes and hoodlums around you. You’re crazy with your own brand of pride and snobbery. There’s nobody good enough for you. ...
I
could have helped you. Now it’s too late!”

  I would not argue with Denise. I felt a certain sympathy with her. She said I was living badly. I agreed. She thought I wasn’t all there, and I would have had to be completely crazy to deny it. She said I was writing stuff that made sense to no one. Maybe so. My last book,
Some Americans
, subtitled
The Sense of Being in the USA
, was quickly remaindered. The publishers had begged me not to print it. They offered to forget a debt of twenty thousand dollars if I would shelve it. But now I was perversely writing Part II. My life was in great disorder.

  I was, however, loyal to something. I had an idea.

  “Why did you ever bring me back to Chicago?” said Denise. “Sometimes I think you did it because your dead are buried here. Is that the reason? Land where my Jewish fathers died? And you dragged me to your graveyard so you could get into the anthem? And what’s it about? All because you have delusions about being a marvelous noble person. Which you are—like hell!”

  Such abuse does Denise more good than vitamins. As for me, I find that certain kinds of misunderstanding are full of useful hints. But my final though silent answer to Denise was always the same. Despite her intelligence, she
had
been bad for my idea. From that standpoint, Renata was the better woman—better for me.

  Renata had forbidden me to drive a Dart. I tried to negotiate with the Mercedes salesman for a secondhand 250-C, but in the showroom Renata—roused, florid, fragrant, large—had put her hand on the silver hood and said, “This one—the coupe.” The touch of her palm was sensual. Even what she did to the car I felt in my own person.

  five

  But now something had to be done about this wreck. I went to the Receiving Room and fetched Roland the doorman—skinny, black, elderly, never-shaven Roland. Roland Stiles, unless I deceived myself (a strong likelihood), was on my side. In my fantasies of solitary death it was Roland whom I saw in my bedroom filling a flight bag with a few articles before calling the police. He did so with my blessing. He particularly needed my electric razor. His intensely black face was pitted and spiky. Shaving with a blade must have been nearly impossible.

  Roland, in the electric-blue uniform, was perturbed. He had seen the ruined car when he came to work in the morning but, he said, “I couldn’t be the one to tell you, Mist’ Citrine.” Tenants on their way to work had seen it, too. They knew of course to whom it belonged. “This is a real bitch,” said Roland soberly, his lean old face twisted and his mouth and mustache puckered. Quickwitted, he had always kidded me about the beautiful ladies who called on me. “They come in Volkswagens and Cadillacs, on bikes and motorcycles, in taxis and walkin’. They ask when you went out, and when you comin’ back, and they leave notes. They come, they come, they come. You some ladies’ man. Plenty of husbands got it in for you, I bet.” But the amusement was gone. Roland hadn’t been a black man sixty years for nothing. He knew moronic infernos. I had lost the immunity which made my ways so entertaining. “You in trouble,” he said. He muttered something about “Miss Universe.” He called Renata Miss Universe. Sometimes she paid him to entertain her little boy in the Receiving Room. The child played with parcels while his mother lay in my bed. I didn’t like it, but you can’t be a ridiculous lover by halves.

  “Now what?”

  Roland twisted his hands outward. He lifted his shoulders. Shrugging, he said, “Call the cops.”

  Yes, a report had to be filed, if only because of the insurance. The insurance company would find this a very queer case. “Well, flag the squad car when it passes. Have those useless fellows look at this ruin,” I said. “And then send them up.”

  I gave him a dollar for his trouble. I usually did that. And now the flow of malevolence had to be reversed.

  Through my apartment door I heard the telephone. It was Cantabile.

  “All right, smart-ass.”

  “Insane!” I said. “Vandalism! Beating a machine. . . !”

  “You’ve seen your car—you saw what you made me do!” He yelled. He forced his voice. Nevertheless it shook.

  “What’s that? You’re blaming me?”

  “You were warned.”

  “
I
made you hammer that beautiful automobile?”

  “You made me. Yes, you. You sure did. You think I don’t have feelings? You wouldn’t believe how I feel about a car like that. You’re stupid. This is nobody’s fault but yours.” I tried to answer but he shouted me down. “You forced me! You made me! Okay, last night was only step one.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Don’t pay me and you’ll see what it means.”

  “What kind of threat is that? This is getting out of hand. Do you mean my daughters?”

  “I’m not going to a collection agency. You don’t know what you’re into. Or who I am. Wake up!”

  I often said “Wake up!” to myself, and many people also have cried, “Wake, wake!” As if I had a dozen eyes, and stubbornly kept them sealed. “Ye have eyes and see not.” This, of course, was absolutely true.

  Cantabile was still speaking. I heard him say, “So, go and ask George Swiebel what to do. He gave you the advice.
He
, like, smashed your car.”

  “Let’s stop all this. I want to settle.”

  “No settle. Pay. Make good the check. The full amount. And cash. No money orders, no cashier’s check, no more fucking around. Cash. I’ll call you later. We’ll make a date. I want to see you.”

  “When?”

  “Never mind when. You stick by the telephone till I call.”

  Next instant I heard the interminable universal electronic miaow of the phone. And I was desperate. I had to tell what had happened. I needed to consult.

  A sure sign of distress: telephone numbers stormed through my head—area codes, digits. I must telephone someone. The first person I called was George Swiebel, of course; I had to tell him what had happened. I also had to warn him. Cantabile might attack him, too. But George was out with a crew. They were pouring a concrete footing somewhere, said Sharon, his secretary. George, before he became a businessman, was, as I have said, an actor. He started out in the Federal Theater. Afterward he was a radio announcer. He had tried television and Hollywood as well. Among business people he spoke of his show-business experience. He knew his Ibsen and his Brecht and he often flew to Minneapolis to see plays at the Guthrie Theatre. In South Chicago he was identified with Bohemia and the Arts, with creativity, with imagination. And he was vital, generous, had an open nature. He was a good guy. People formed strong attachments to him. Look at this little Sharon, his secretary. She was a hillbilly, dwarfish and queer-faced, and looked like Mammy Yokum in the funnies. Yet George was her brother, her doctor, her priest, her tribe. She had, as it were, surveyed South Chicago and found only one man there, George Swiebel. When I spoke to her, I had enough presence of mind to dissemble, for if I had told Sharon how shocking things were she would not have given George the message. George’s average day, as he and his people saw it, was one crisis after another. Her job was to protect him. “Ask George to call me,” I said. I hung up thinking of the crisis-outlook in the USA, a legacy from old frontier times, etcetera. I thought these things from force of habit. Just because your soul is being torn to pieces doesn’t mean that you stop analyzing the phenomena.

  I restrained my real desire, which was to scream. I recognized that I would have to recompose myself unassisted. I didn’t dial Renata. Renata is not especially good at giving consolation over the phone. You have to get it from her in person.

  Now I had Cantabile’s ring to wait for. And the police as well. I had to explain to Murra the CPA that I wouldn’t be coming in. He’d charge me for the hour anyway, after the manner of psychiatrists and other specialists. That afternoon I was to have taken my small daughters Lish and Mary to their piano teacher. For, as the Gulbransen Piano Co. used to say on the brick walls of Chicago, “The richest child is poor without a musical education.” And mine were rich man’s daughters, and it would be a disaster if they grew up unable to play “Fur Elise” and the “Happy Farmer.”

  I had to recover my calm. Seeking stability, I did the one Yoga exercise I know. I took the small change and the keys out of my pockets, I removed my shoes, took a position on the floor, advancing my toes, and, with a flip, I stood on my head. My loveliest of machines, my silver Mercedes 280, my gem, my love-offering, stood mutilated in the street. Two thousand dollars’ worth of bodywork would never restore the original smoothness of the metal skin. The headlights were crushed blind. I hadn’t the heart to try the doors, they might be jammed shut. I tried to concentrate on hatred and fury—revenge, revenge! But I couldn’t get anywhere with that. I could only see the German steward at the shop in his long white smock, like a dentist, telling me that parts would have to be imported. And I, clutching my half-bald head in both hands as if in despair, fingers interlocked, had my trembling aching legs in the air, tufts of side-hair sticking out, and the green Persian carpet flowing under me. I was heart-injured. I was desolate. The beauty of the carpet was one of my comforts. I have become deeply attached to carpets, and this one was a work of art. The green was soft and varied with great subtlety. The red was one of those surprises that seem to spring straight from the heart. Stribling, my downtown expert, told me that I could get far more than I had paid for this rug. Everything that wasn’t mass-produced was zooming in value. Stribling was an obese excellent man who kept horses but now was too heavy to ride. Few people seemed to be consummating anything good, these days. Look at me. I couldn’t be serious, becoming involved in this sort of grotesque comic Mercedes-and-Underworld thing. As I stood on my head, I knew (I
would
know!) that there was a sort of theoretical impulse behind this grotesqueness too, one of the powerful theories of the modern world being that for self-realization it’s necessary to embrace the deformity and absurdity of the inmost being (we
know
it’s there!). Be healed by the humiliating truth the Unconscious contains. I didn’t buy this theory, but that didn’t mean that I was free from it. I had a talent for absurdity, and you don’t throw away any of your talents.