The Collected Stories Of Saul Bellow Part 26

She used reading gla.s.ses; Victor had no need of them. In some respects he hadn't aged at all. For a big man he was graceful, and for an old one he was youthful. Krieggstein might be right, and the excitement of thought did prevent decay-her policeman friend must have overheard this somewhere, or picked it up in the "Feminique" section of the Tribune._ On his own he couldn't make such observations.

The fixtures in the lounge were like those in the cabin of a plane, and Victor had to hold up the paper to catch the slanted ceiling-light beam. "A quick onceover," he said. "I don't expect much. 'Why people have taken to saying that truth is stranger'-or did I say 'stronger'?-'than fiction. Because liberal democracy makes for enfeebled forms of self-consciousness-who was the fellow who said that speaking for himself he would never exchange the public world, for all its harshness and imperfections, for the stuffiness of a private world? Weak self-conceptions, poor fictions. Lack of an Idea._ Collective preemption of Ideas_ by professional groups (lawyers, doctors, engineers). They make a simulacrum of "standards," and this simulacrum becomes the morality of their profession. All sense of individual cheating disappears. First step toward "stability," for them, is to cancel individual moral judgments. Leaders.h.i.+p can then be a.s.sumed by fictional personages.' "

"Would you say our leaders are fictional personages?" said Katrina.

"Wouldn't you?"

Victor didn't look well now. The red in his cheeks was an irritable red, and there were other dangerous signs of distemper. He stared at her in that way he had of seeming, once more, to review her credentials. It was humiliating. But she joined him in his doubts and was sorry for him. It was best for him now to talk. Even when he had to forgo the certainty of being understood. He lowered his head like a bull deciding whether or not to gore, and then he went on talking. She liked it best when his talk was mischievous and mean-when he said that a man had no brain but a fish bladder in his skull. Seriousness was more worrisome, and at present he was being serious. He told Katrina now that he didn't think these were useful notes. He had said the same things in his Marx lecture and said them better. Marx connected individual wakefulness with cla.s.s struggle. When social cla.s.ses found themselves prevented from acting politically, and cla.s.s struggle fell into abeyance, temporarily, consciousness also became confused-waking, sleeping, dreaming, all mixed up.

Did he still consider himself a Marxist? Katrina wanted to know. She was scared by her own temerity, but even more afraid of being dumb. "I ask because you speak of cla.s.s struggle. But also because you consider the Communist countries such a failure."

He said that, well, he had trained his mind on hard Marxist texts in his formative years and was permanently influenced-and why not? After reading The Eighteenth Brumaire_ again, he was convinced that Marx had America's present number. Here Victor, his leg extended like one of Admiral Nelson's cannon under wraps, gave a characteristically dazzling glance from beneath the primeval tangle of his brows and said that the Buffalo talk and the Chicago one would be connected. When wage earners, the middle cla.s.s, the professions, lose track of their true material interests, they step outside history, so to speak, and then non-cla.s.s interests take over, and when that happens society itself collapses into neuroses. An era of playacting begins. Vast revolutionary changes are concealed by the trivialities of the actors. Clowns and ham actors govern, or seem to. Superficially, it looks like farce. The deeper reality is anything but.

He was such an exceptional being altogether that because of the vast difference (to lesser people, Katrina meant), he himself might strike you as an actor. The interval of serious conversation had made him look more like himself-it had revived him. Katrina now admitted, "I was worried about you, Vic."

"Why? Because I asked you to come? I'm sore at those guys in Chicago and I wanted to tell you about it. I felt frustrated and depleted."

He can tell me things he's too dignified to say otherwise. He can be the child, Katrina concluded. Which not even my own kids will be with me. As a mother I seem to be an artificial product. Would that be because I can't put any s.e.x into being a mother? She said to Victor, "My guess was that the bleak weather and the travel were getting you down."

Oh, as for bleakness. Examining her, he established that "bleak" was a different thing for him. Nor did he mean low spirits when he said "depleted." He wasn't low, he was higher than he liked, very high, in danger of being disconnected. He was superlucid, which he always wanted to be, but this lucidity had its price: clear ideas becoming ever more clear the more the ground opened under your feet-illumination increasing together with your physiological progress toward death. I never expected to live forever, but neither did I expect this._ And there was no saying what this_ was, precisely. It was both definite and cloudy. And here Katrina gave him support, materially. Katrina, a lady with a full body, sat on her swelling bottom line. She wore a knitted dark-green costume. She had strong legs in black boots. Where the ostrich quills once grew, the surface of the leather was bubbled. Very plain to him in her figure were the great physical forces of the human trunk and the weight of the backswell, the separation of the thighs. The composure of her posture had a wh.o.r.e effect on him-did she know this or not? Was she aware that her neatness made him h.o.r.n.y? He kept it from her, so that she had no idea of the attraction of her hands, especially the knuckle folds and the tips of what he called, to himself only, her touch-c.o.c.k fingers. Katrina was his manifest Eros, this worried, comical lady for whom he had such complex emotions, for the sake of which he put up with so many idiocies, struggled with so many irritations. She could irritate him to the point of heartbreak, so that he asked was it worth it, and why didn't he spin off this stupid c.u.n.t; and couldn't he spend his old age better, or had his stars run out of influence altogether? He used to be able to take his business where he liked. That pagan availability was closing out. At first, she had been his lump of love. He counted the stages. At first, just fun. The next stage was laughable, as he recognized through her that his erotic epoch might after all be the Victorian, with its special doodads. Then there seemed to be a kind of Baudelairean phase, ... tu connais la caresse Qui fait revivre les morts..._ Only he didn't in fact buy that. His wasn't an example of clinically disturbed s.e.xuality. He felt detached from all such fancy stuff. She did_ in fact have the touch that brought back the dead-his dead. But there was no witchery or sadic darkness about it. Evidently, whether he liked it or not, his was a common s.e.xual type. He was beyond feeling the disgrace of its commonness. She kept him going, and he had to confess that he wouldn't know what to do at all if he didn't keep going. Therefore he went flying around. He was not ready to succ.u.mb. He paid no more attention to death than to a litter of puppies pulling at the cuffs of his pants.

About bleak winter, he was saying to Katrina, "I have trouble staying warm. I've heard that capsic.u.m helps. For the capillaries. Last night was bad. I put my feet in hot water. I had to wear double socks and still was cold."

"I can take care ofthat."

Wonderful, what powers women will claim.

"And Vanessa, this morning-what was she like?"

"Well," he said, "what these kids really want is to make you obey the same powers that they_ have to serve. The older generation, it happens, cooperates with them. The Cuban mother was puzzled. I could read it in her eyes-'What in h.e.l.l are you people up_ to?' "

"Oh, you met her."

"You bet I did. This morning I was sitting in her kitchen, and the boy was our interpreter. The kid's IQ must be out of sight. The woman says she has nothing against Vanessa. Nessa has made herself part of the family. She's moved in on them. She peels potatoes and washes pots. She and the boy don't go to restaurants and movies because he has no money and won't let her pay. So they study day and night, and they're both on the dean's list. But my daughter is just meddling. She abducted the genius of the family who was supposed to be the salvation of his siblings and his mama."

"But she says she loves him, and looks at you with those long eyes she inherited from you."

"She's a little b.i.t.c.h. I found out that she was giving her mother s.e.x advice. How a modern wife can please a husband better. And you have to find new ways to humor an old man. She told Beila all about some h.o.m.os.e.xual encyclopedia. She said not to buy it, but gave her the address of a shop where she could read some pa.s.sages on foreplay."

Katrina saw nothing funny in this. She was stabbed with anger. "Were you approached? That way?"

"By Beila? Everybody would have to go mad altogether."

No, not Beila. You had only to think about it to see how impossible it would be. Beila carried herself with the pride of the presiding woman, the wife. Her rights were maintained with Native American dignity. She was a gloomy person. (Victor had made her gloomy-one could understand that.) She was like the wife of a Cherokee chieftain, or again Catherine of Aragon. There was something of each type of woman in the gaudy-gloomy costumes she designed for herself. Tremendous, her silent air of self-respect. For such a proud person to experiment along lines suggested by a gay handbook was out of the question, totally. Still, Katrina felt the hurt of it. Disrespect. Ill will. It was disrespectful also of Beila. Beila was long-suffering. At heart, Beila was a generous woman. Katrina really did know the score.

"So there's the new generation," said Victor. "When you consider the facts, they seem sometimes to add up to an argument for abortion. My youngest child! The wildest of all three. Now she's abandoned her plan to be a rabbi and she looks more Jewish than ever, with those twists of hair beside her ears."

Curious how impersonal Victor could be. Categories like wife, parent, child never could affect his judgment. He could discuss a daughter like any other subject submitted to his concentrated, radiant consideration-with the same generalizing detachment. It wasn't unkindness. It wasn't ordinary egotism. Katrina didn't have the word for it.

Anyway, they were together in the lounge, and to have him to herself was one of her best pleasures. He was always being identified on New York streets, b.u.t.tonholed by readers, bugged by painters (and there were millions of people who painted), but here in this sequestered corner Katrina did not expect to be molested. She was wrong. A man appeared; he entered obviously looking for someone. That someone could only be Victor. She gave a warning signal-lift of the head-and Victor cautiously turned and then said in a low voice, somewhat morose, "It's him-I mean the character who wrote me the note."

"Oh-oh."

"He's a determined little guy.... That's quite a fur coat he's wearing. It must have been designed by F. A. O. Schwarz." It seemed to sweeten his temper to have said this. He smiled a little.

"That_is an expensive garment," said Katrina.

It was a showy thing, beautifully made but worn carelessly. In circles of fur, something like the Michelin tire circles, it reached almost to the floor. Larry Wrangel was slight, slender, his bald head was unusually long. The grizzled side hair, unbrushed, looked as if he had slept on it when it was damp. A long soiled white scarf, heavy silk, drooped over the fur. Under the scarf a Woolworth's red bandanna was knotted. The white fur must have been his travel coat. For it wouldn't have been of any use in Southern California. His tanned face was lean, the skin stretched-perhaps a face-lift? Katrina speculated. His scalp was spotted with California freckles. The dark eyebrows were nicely arched. His mouth was thin, shy and also astute.

Victor said as they were shaking hands, "I couldn't get back to you last night."

"I didn't really expect it."

Wrangel pulled over one of the Swedish-modern chairs and sat forward in his rolls of white fur. Not removing the coat was perhaps his way of dealing with the difference in their sizes-bulk against height.

He said, "I guessed you would be surrounded, and also bushed by late evening. Considering the weather, you had a good crowd."

Wrangel did not ignore women. As he spoke he inspected Katrina. He might have been trying to determine why Victor should have taken up with this one. Whole graduating cla.s.ses of girls on the make used to pursue Victor.

Katrina quickly reconciled herself to Wrangel-a little, smart man, not snooty with her, no enemy. He was eager only to have a talk, long antic.i.p.ated, a serious first-cla.s.s talk. Victor, unwell, feeling damaged, was certainly thinking how to get rid of the man.

Wrangel was chatting rapidly, wanting to strike the right offering while avoiding loss of time. His next move was to try the Cedar Bar and the Artists'

Club on Eighth Street. He spoke of Baziotes and of Ars.h.i.+le Gorky, of Gorky's loft on Union Square. He recalled that Gorky couldn't get Walt Whitman's name straight and that he spoke of him as "Vooterman." He mentioned Parker Tyler, and Tyler's book on Pavel Tchelitchew, naming also Edith Sitwell, who had been in love with Tchelitchew (Wulpy grimaced at Edith Sitwell and said, "Tinkle poems, like harness bells"). Wrangel laughed, betraying much tension in his laughter. Shyness and shrewdness made him seem to squint and even to jeer. He wished to become expansive, to make himself agreeable. But he didn't have the knack for this. An expert in pleasing Victor, Katrina could have told him where he was going wrong. Victor's att.i.tude was one of angry restraint and thinly dissimulated impatience. Trina felt that he was being too severe. This Wrangel fellow should be given half a chance. He was being put down too hard because he was a celebrity.

On closer inspection, the white furs which should have been immaculate were spotted by food and drink; nor was there any reason (he was so rich!) why the silk scarf should be so soiled. She took a liking to Wrangel, though, because he made a point of including her in the conversation. If he mentioned a name like Chiaromonte or Barrett, he would say, aside, "A top intellectual in that circle," or, "The fellow who introduced Americans to German phenomenology."

But Victor wouldn't have any of this nostalgia, and he said, "What are you doing in Buffalo anyway? This is a h.e.l.l of a season to leave California."

"I have a screwy kind of motive," said Wrangel. "Clinical psychologists, you see, often send me suggestions for films, inspired by the fantasies of crazy patients. So once a year I make a swing of selected funny farms. And here in Buffalo I saw some young fellows who were computer bugs-now inst.i.tutionalized."

"That's a new wrinkle," said Victor. "I would have thought that you didn't need to leave California, then."

"The maddest mad are on the Coast? Do you think so?"

"Well, not now, maybe," Victor said. Then he made one of his characteristic statements: "It takes a serious political life to keep reality real. So there are sections of the country where brain softening is accelerated. And Southern California from the first has been set up for the maximum exploitation of whatever goes wrong with the American mind. They farm the kinks as much as they do lettuces and oranges."

"Yes, I suppose so," said Wrangel.

"As for the part played by intellectuals... Well, I suppose in this respect there's not much difference between California and Ma.s.sachusetts. They're in the act together with everybody else. I mean intellectuals. Impossible for them to hold out. Besides, they're so badly educated they can't even identify the evils. Even Vespasian when he collected his toilet tax had to justify himself: Pecunia non olet._ But we've come to a point where it's only_ money that doesn't stink."

"True, intellectuals are in shameful shape...."

Katrina observed that Wrangel's eyes were iodine-colored. There was an iodine tinge even to the whites.

"The main money people despise the intelligentsia, I mean especially the fellows that bring the entertainment industry suggestions for deepening the general catalepsy. Or the hysteria."

Wrangel took this meekly enough. He seemed to have thought it all through for himself and then pa.s.sed on to further considerations. "The banks, of course..." he said. "It can take about twenty million bucks to make one of these big pictures, and they need a profit in the neighborhood of three hundred percent. But as for money, I can remember when Jackson Pollock was driving at top speed in and out of the trees at East Hampton while loving up a girl in his jeep. He wouldn't have been on welfare and food stamps, if he had lived. He played with girls, with art, with death, and wound up with dollars. What do those drip canvases fetch now?" Wrangel said this in a tone so moderate that he got away with it. "Sure, the investment golems think of me as a gold mine, and they detest me. I detest them right back, in spades." He said to Katrina, "Did you hear Victor's lecture last night? It was the first time in forty years that I actually found myself taking notes like a student."

Katrina couldn't quite decide what opinion Victor was forming of this Wrangel. When he'd had enough, he would get up and go. No boring end-men would ever trap him in the middle. As yet there was no sign that he was about to brush the man off. She was glad of that; she found Wrangel entertaining, and she was as discreet as could be in working the band of her watch forward on her wrist. Tactful, she drew back her sleeve to see the time. Very soon now the kids would be having their snack. Silent Pearl, wordless Soolie. She had failed to get a rise out of them with the elephant story. A lively response would have helped her to finish it. But you simply couldn't get them to react. Not even Lieutenant Krieggstein with his display of guns impressed them. Krieggstein may have confused them when he pulled up his trousers and showed the holster strapped to his stout short leg. Then, too, he sometimes wore his wig and sometimes not. That also might have been confusing.

Victor had decided to give Wrangel a hearing. If this proved to be a waste of time, he would start forward, a.s.semble his limbs, take his stick upside down like a polo mallet, and set off, as silent as Pearl, as wordless as Soolie. Since he loved conversation, his cutting out would be a dreadful judgment on the man. "You gave me a lot to think about during the night," said Wrangel. "Your comments on the nonrevolution of Louis Napoleon and his rabble of deadbeats, and especially the application of that to the present moment-what you called the proletarianized present." He took out a small notebook, which Trina identified as a Gucci product, and read out one of his notes. " 'Proletarianization: people deprived of everything that formerly defined humanity to itself as human.' "

Never mind the fellow's thoughts of the night, Victor was trying to adjust himself to the day, s.h.i.+fting his frame, looking for a position that didn't shoot pains down the back of his thigh. Since the operation, his belly was particularly tender, distended and lumpy, and the small hairs stuck him like burning darts. As if turned inward. The nerve endings along the scar were like the tip of a copper wire with the strands undone. For his part, Wrangel seemed fit-youthfully elderly, durably fragile, probably a vegetarian. As he was trying to fix Wrangel's position, somewhere between cla.s.sics of thought (Hegel) and the funny papers, there came before Victor the figures of Happy Hooligan and the Captain from The Katzenjammer Kids_ with the usual detached colors, streaks of Chinese vermilion and blocks of forest green. Looking regal, feeling jangled, Victor sat and listened. Wrangel's eyes were inflamed; it must really have been a bad night for him. He had a wry, wistful, starveling expression on his face, and his silk banner made you think of the scarf that had broken Isadora's neck. His main pitch was now beginning. He had read The Eighteenth Brumaire,_ and he could prove it. Why had the French Revolution been made in the Roman style? All the revolutionists had read Plutarch. Marx noted that they had been inspired by "old poetry."

"Ancient traditions lying like a nightmare on the brains of the living."

"I see that you boned up on your Marx."

"It's marvelous stuff." Wrangel refused to take offense. All of Katrina's sympathies were with him. He was behaving well. He said, "Now let's see if I can put it together with your_ conjectures. It's still a struggle with the burden of history. Le mort saisit le vif._ And you suggest that the modern avant-garde hoped to be free from this death grip of tradition. Art becoming an activity in which life brings raw material to the artists, and the artist using his imagination to bring forth a world of his own, owing nothing to the old humanism."

"Well, okay. What of it?" said Victor.

Katrina's impression was that Wrangel was pleased with himself. He thought he was pa.s.sing his orals. "Then you said that the parody of a revolution in 1851-history as farce-might be seen as a prelude to today's politics of deception-government by comedians who use ma.s.s-entertainment techniques. Concocted personalities, pseudoevents."

Worried for him now, Katrina moved to the edge of her seat. She thought it might be necessary to rise soon, get going, break it up. "So you fly around the country and talk to psychiatrists," she said.

Her intervention was not welcome, although Wrangel was polite. "Yes."

A sound approach to popular entertainment," said Victor. "Enlist the psychopaths."

"Try leaving them out, at any level," said Wrangel, only slightly stiff. He said, "In Detroit I'm seeing a party named Fox. He has published a doc.u.ment by a certain D'Amiens, who is sometimes also Borys.h.i.+nski. The author is supposed to have disappeared without a trace. He had made the dangerous discovery that the planet is controlled by powers from other worlds. All this according to Mr. Fox's book. These other-world powers have programmed the transformation and control of the human species through something called CORP-ORG-THINK. They work through a central data bank and they already have control of the biggest corporations, banking circles, and political elites. Some of their leading people are David Rockefeller, Whitney Stone of Stone and Webster, Robert Anderson of Arco. And the overall plan is to destroy our life-support system, and then to evacuate the planet. The human race will be moved to a more suitable location."

"And what becomes of this earth?" said Katrina.

"It becomes h.e.l.l, the h.e.l.l of the unfit whom CORP plans to leave behind. When the long reign of Quantification begins, says Borys.h.i.+nski, mankind will accept a purely artificial mentality, and the divine mind will be overthrown by the technocratic mind."

"Does this sound to you like a possible film?" said Katrina.

"If they don't ask too much for the rights, I might be interested."

"How would you go about saving us-in the picture, I mean?" Victor said. "Maybe Marx suggests some angle that you can link up with the divine mind."

Katrina hoped that Wrangel would stand up to Victor, and he did. Being deferential got you nowhere; you had to fight him if you wanted his good opinion. Wrangel said, "I'd forgotten how grand a writer Marx was. What marvelous images! The ghosts of Rome surrounding the cradle of the new epoch. The bourgeois revolution storming from success to success. 'Ecstasy the everyday spirit.'

'Men and things set in sparkling brilliants.' But a revolution that draws its poetry from the past is condemned to end in depression and dullness. A real revolution is not imitative or histrionic. It's a real_ event."

"Oh, all right," said Victor. "You're dying to tell me what you_ think. So why don't you tell me and get it over with."

"My problem is with cla.s.s struggle," said Wrangel, "the destiny of social cla.s.ses. You argue that cla.s.s paralysis produces these effects of delusion-lying, cheating, false appearances. It all seems real, but what's really real is the unseen convulsion under the apparitions. You're imposing European conceptions of cla.s.s on Americans."

Katrina's thought was: Ah, he wants to play with the big boys. She was afraid he might be hurt.

"And what's your idea?" said Victor.

"Well," said Wrangel, "I have a friend who says that the created souls of people, of the Americans, have been removed. The created soul has been replaced by an artificial one, so there's nothing real that human beings can refer to when they try to judge any matter for themselves. They live mainly by rationales._ They have made-up guidance systems."

"That's the artificial mentality of your Borys.h.i.+nski," said Victor.

"It has nothing to do with Borys.h.i.+nski. Borys.h.i.+nski came much later."

"Is this friend of yours a California friend? Is he a guru?" said Victor.

"I wish we had had time for a real talk," said Wrangel. "You always set a high value on ideas, Victor. I remember that. Well, I've considered this from many sides, and I am convinced that most ideas are trivial. A thought of the real is also an image of the real; if it's a true thought, it's a true picture and is accompanied also by a true feeling. Without this, our ideas are corpses...."

"Well, by G.o.d!" Victor took up his stick, and Katrina was afraid that he might take a swipe at Wrangel, whack him with it. But no, he planted the stick before him and began to rise. It was a complicated operation. s.h.i.+fting forward, he braced himself upon his knuckles. He lifted up the b.u.m leg; his color was hectic. Remember (Katrina remembered) that he was almost always in pain.

Katrina explained as she was picking up the duffel bag and the violin case, "We have a plane to catch."

Wrangel answered with a sad smile. "I see. Can't fight flight schedules, can we?"

Victor righted his cap from the back and made for the door, stepping wide in his crippled energetic gait.

Outside the lounge Katrina said, "We still have about half an hour to kill."

"Driven out."

"He was terribly disappointed."

"Sure he was. He came east just to take me on. Maybe his guru told him that he was strong enough, at last. He gave himself away when he mentioned Parker Tyler and Tchelitchew. Tchelitchew, you see, attacked me. He said he_ had a vision of the world, whereas the abstract painting that I advocated was like a crazy lady expecting a visit from the doctor and smearing herself with excrement to make herself attractive-like a love potion. Wrangel was trying to stick me with this insult."

Threatening weather, the wicked Canadian north wind crossing the border in white gusts, didn't delay boarding. The first to get on the plane was Victor. His special need, an aisle seat at the back, made this legitimate. It depressed Katrina to enter the empty dark cabin. The sky looked dirty, and she was anxious. Their seats were in the tail, next to the rest rooms. She stowed the violin overhead and the zipper bag under the seat. Victor lowered himself into place, arranged his body, leaned backward, and shut his eyes. Either he was very tired or he wanted to be alone with his thoughts.

The pi ane filled up. It was some comfort that despite the mean look of the weather, practical-minded people never doubted that they would lift off from Buffalo and land in Chicago-business as usual. In the hand of G.o.d, but also routine. Katrina, who looked sensible along with the rest of the pa.s.sengers, didn't know what to do about her anxious doubts, couldn't collect them in a single corner and turn the key on them. In one respect Dotey was dead right: Katrina jumped at any chance to rush off and be with Victor. Victor, even if he was ailing, even if no life with him was really possible-he couldn't last long-was entirely different from other people. Other people mostly stood in a kind of bleakness. They had the marks of privation upon them. There was a lack of s.p.a.ce and air about them, they were humanly bare, whereas Victor gave off a big light. Strange little Wrangel may have been a pretentious twerp. He wanted to exchange serious thoughts; he might be puffing himself up absurdly, a faker, as Victor suspected. But when he had talked about ecstasy as the everyday spirit or men and things set in brilliants, she had understood exactly what he was saying. She had understood even better when he said that when the current stopped, the dullness and depression were worse than ever. To spell it out further, she herself could never generate any brilliancy. If she had somebody to get her going, she could join in and perhaps make a contribution. This contribution would be feminine and s.e.xual. It would be important, it might even be indispensable, but it would not be inventive. She could, however, be inventive in deceit. And she had made an effort to branch out with the elephant story. She had, nevertheless, had that serious setback with _M*A SH.__ The movie house itself had been part of her misfortune. They were surrounded by hippies, not very young ones, and in the row ahead there was a bearded guy slurping Popsicles and raising himself to one cheek, letting off loud farts. Victor said, "There's change from the general for the caviar it's eaten." Katrina hadn't yet figured out that_ one. Then Victor stood up and said, "I won't sit in this stink!" When they reached the street, the disgrace and horror of being exposed_ by _M*A SH__ and a.s.sociated with San Francisco degenerates made Katrina want to throw herself in front of a cable car rus.h.i.+ng downhill from the Mark Hopkins.

Now she made a shelf of her hand on her brow and looked away from Victor, who was staring out at the field. Was there anything she could do about that G.o.dd.a.m.n elephant? Suppose a man turned up who hypnotized ball players and could do the same with an animal. They were now discovering new mental powers in the bigger mammals. Whales, for example, sang to one another; they were even thought to be capable of rhyming. Whales built walls out of air bubbles and could encircle and entrap millions of shrimp. What if an eccentric zoologist were to visit the management with a new idea? Meanwhile the management had to send for fodder while the elephant dropped whole pyramids of dung. The creature was melancholy and wept tears as big as apricots. The mahout demanded mud. If Margey didn't have a good wallow soon, she'd go berserk and wreck the entire fifth floor. Abercrombie & Fitch (were they still in Chicago?) offered to send over a big-game hunter. For them it would be terrific publicity to shoot her. Humane people would be outraged. Suppose a pretty high school girl were to come forward with the solution? And what if she were to be a Chinese girl? In Chinese myth, elephants and not men had once been the masters of the world. And then?

Victor's mind was also at work, although you couldn't say that he was thinking. Something soft and heavy seemed to have been spread over his body. It resembled the lead ap.r.o.n laid over you by X-ray technicians. Victor was stretched under this suave deadly weight and feeling as you felt when waking from a deep sleep-unable to lift your arm. On the field, in the winter light, the standing machines were paler than the air, and the entire airport stood in a frame of snow, looking like a steel engraving. It reminded him of the Lower East Side in-oh, about 1912. The boys (ancients today, those who were alive) were reading the Pentateuch. The street, the stained pavement, was also like a page of Hebrew text, something you might translate if you knew how. Jacob lay dreaming of a ladder which rose into heaven. V'hinei malachi elohim_-behold the angels of G.o.d going up and down. This had caused Victor no surprise. What age was he, about six? It was not a dream to him. Jacob_ was dreaming, while Victor was awake, reading. There was no "long ago." It was all now. The cellar cla.s.sroom had a narrow window at sidewalk level, just enough to permit a restricted upward glance showing fire escapes under snow, the gold shop sign of the Chinese laundry hanging from the ironwork, and angels climbing up and down. This did not have to be interpreted. It came about in a trance, as if under the leaden weight of the flexible ap.r.o.n. Now the plane was starting its takeoff run, and soon the NO SMOKING sign would be turned off. Victor would have liked to smoke, but the weight of his hands made any movement impossible.

It wasn't like him to cherish such recollections, although he had them, and they had lately been more frequent. He began now to remember that his mother had given him the windpipe of a goose after drying it in the Dutch oven of the coal stove, and that he had cut a notch in the windpipe with his father's straight razor and made a whistle of it. When it was done, he disliked it. Even when dry it had kept its terrible red color, and it was very harsh to the touch and had left an unpleasant taste in his mouth. This was not exactly Marx's nightmare of history from which mankind had to be liberated. The raw fowl taste was nasty. The angels on the fire escape, however, were very pleasing, and his consciousness of them, while it was four thousand years old, had also been exactly contemporary. Different ideas of time and s.p.a.ce had not yet been imposed upon him. One comprehensive light contained everybody. Among the rest-parents, patriarchs, angels, G.o.d-there was yourself. Victor did not feel bound to get to the bottom of this; it was only a trance, probably an effect of fatigue and injury. He gave a side thought to Ma.s.s. General, where a tumor had been lifted out of a well of blood in his belly, and he reminded himself that he was still a convalescent-reminded himself also that Baudelaire had believed the artist to be always in a spiritually convalescent state. (This really was Baudelaire Day; just a while ago it had been the touch that brought the dead to life.) Only just returned from the shadow of death, the convalescent inhaled with delight the close human odors of the plane. Pollution didn't matter, the state of a convalescent being the state of a child drunk with impressions. Genius must be_ the recovery of the powers of childhood by an act of the creative will._ Victor knew all this like the palm of his hand or the nose on his face. By combining the strength of a man (a.n.a.lytic power) with the ecstasy of a child you could discover the New. What G.o.d's Revelation implied was that the Jews (his children) would obstinately will (with mature intelligence) the divine adult promise. This would earn them the hatred of the whole world. They were always archaic, and_ they were always contemporary-we could sort that out later.

But now suppose that this should not_ be convalescence but something else, and that he should be on the circuit not because he was recovering but because he was losing ground. Falling apart? This was where Katrina entered the picture. Hers was the touch that resurrected, or that reunited, reintegrated his otherwise separating physical powers. He asked himself: That she turns me on, does that mean that I love her, or does it simply mean that she belongs to the cla.s.s of women that turn me on? He didn't like the question he was asking. But he was having many difficult sensations, innumerable impressions of winter, winters of seven decades superimposed. The winter world even brought him a sound, not for the ear but for some other organ. And none of this was clearly communicable, nor indeed worth communicating. It was simply part of the continuing life of every human being. Everybody was filled with visions that had been repressed, and ama.s.sed involuntarily, and when you were sick they were harder to disperse.

"I can tell you, now that we're in the air, Victor, that I am relieved._ I wasn't sure we'd get back." The banking plane gave them a single glimpse of Lake Erie slanting green to the right, and then rose into dark-gray snow clouds. It was a b.u.mpy flight. The headwind was strong. "Have I ever told you about my housekeeper's husband? He's a handsome old Negro who used to be a dining-car waiter. Now he gambles. Impressive to look at. Ysole's afraid of him."

"Why are we discussing him?"

"I wonder if I shouldn't have a talk with her husband about Ysole. If she takes money from Alfred, my ex-husband, if she should testify against me in the case, it would be serious. Alfred's lawyer could bring out that she raised_ me, and therefore has my number."

"Would she want to harm you as much as that?"

"Well, she's always been somewhat cracked. She used to call herself a conjure -woman. She's shrewd and full of the devil."

"I wonder why we're flying at this alt.i.tude. By now we should have been above the clouds," said Victor.

They had fifteen minutes of open sky and then dropped back again into the darkness. "Yes, why are we so low?" said Katrina. "We're not getting anywhere."

The seat-belt sign went on and the pilot announced, "Owing to the weather, O'Hare Airport is closed, briefly. We will be landing in Detroit in five minutes."