The Collected Stories Of Saul Bellow Part 25

Dorothea drove herself, trembling, out of the house. Think how hard it was for her to call on chain-store buyers and inst.i.tutional purchasing agents. She even managed to get on the tube to promote her product, w.a.n.gling invitations from UHF ethnic and Moral Majority stations as a Woman Executive. Sometimes she seemed to be fainting under her burdens, purple lids closing. On the air, however, she was unfailingly vivacious and put on a charming act. And when she was aroused, she was very tough. "Let Wulpy go home if he's sick. Why doesn't his wife come fetch him?"

"Don't forget, I almost lost Victor last year," said Katrina.

" You_ almost... almost lost him._ "

"It's true you had surgery the same week, and I had to be away, but you weren't on the critical list, Dotey."

"I wasn't referring to me but to his wife, that poor woman, and what she suffered from you and other lady friends.... If she had to leave the room, this ding-a-ling broad from Evanston would rush in and throw herself on the sick man."

No use telling Dotey not to be so rude and vulgar. Katrina listened to her with a certain pa.s.sivity, even with satisfaction-it amounted, almost, to pleasure. You might call it perturbation-pleasure. Dotey continued: "It isn't right that the man should use his mighty prestige on a poor lady from the suburbs. It's shooting fish in a barrel. You'll tell me that you have the magical secret, how to turn him on...."

"I don't think that it's what I do,_ Dotey. It happens simply to be me._ He even loves my varicose veins, which I would try to hide from somebody else. Or my uneven gum line, and that was my lifelong embarra.s.sment. And when my eyes are puffy, even that draws him."

"Christ, that's it then," said Dorothea, testy. "You hold the lucky number. With you he gets it up."

Katrina thought: Why should we talk so intimately if there isn't going to be any sympathy? It was sad. But on a more reasonable view you couldn't blame Dorothea for being irritable, angry, and envious. She had a failing business to run. She needed a husband. She had no prospects to speak of. She hates the fact that I'm now completely out of her league, Katrina told herself. Over these four years I've met people like John Cage, Bucky Fuller, de Kooning. I come home and tell her how I chatted with Jackie Ona.s.sis or Franoise de la Renta. All she has to tell me is how hard it is to push her plastic bags, and how nasty and evil-minded those purchasing agents are.

Dorothea had lost patience. When she thought that the affair with Victor was a flash in the pan, she had been more tolerant, willing to listen. Katrina had even persuaded her to read some of Victor's articles. They had started with an easy one, "From Apollinaire to E. E. c.u.mmings," but then went on to more difficult texts, like "Paul Valry and the Complete Mind,"

"Marxism in Modern French Thought." They didn't tackle Marx himself, but they had French enough between them to do Valry 's Monsieur Teste,_ and they met for lunch at Old Orchard Shopping Center to discuss this strange book. First they looked at clothes, for with so many acres of luxurious merchandise about them it would have been impossible to concentrate immediately on Teste._ Katrina had always tried to widen her horizons. For many years she had taken flying lessons. She was licensed to pilot a single-engine plane. After a lapse of twenty years she had tried to resume piano lessons. She had studied the guitar, she kept up her French at the center on Ontario Street. Once, during the worst of times, she had taken up foreign sports cars, driving round and round the north suburbs with no destination. She had learned lots of Latin, for which she had no special use. At one time she considered going into law, and had pa.s.sed the apt.i.tude test with high marks. Trying to zero in on some kind of perfection. And then in a booth at Old Orchard, Katrina and Dorothea had smoked cigarettes and examined Valry: What was the meaning of the complete mind, "man as full consciousness"? Why did it make Madame Teste happy to be studied by her husband, as happy to be studied as to be loved? Why did she speak of him as "the angel of pure consciousness"? To grasp Valry was hard enough. Wulpy on_ Valry was utterly inaccessible to Dorothea, and she demanded that Trina explain. "Here he compares Monsieur Teste to Karl Marx-what does he mean by that?"

"Well," said Katrina, trying hard, "let's go back to this statement. It says, 'Minds that come from the void into this strange carnival and bring lucidity from outside Then Dotey cried, "Which_ void?" She wore the poodle hairdo as a cover for or an admission of the limitations of her bony head. But even this may have been a ruse, as she was really very clever in her way. Only her bosom was filled with a boiling mixture of sisterly feelings, vexation, resentment. She would bear with Katrina for a while and then she would say, "What is it with you and the intelligentsia? Because we went to the Pont Royal bar and none of those philosophers tried to pick us up? Or are you competing intellectually with the mans wife?"

No, Beila Wulpy had no such pretensions. The role of the great man's wife was what she played. She did it with dignity. Dark and stout, beautiful in her way, she reminded you of Catherine of Aragon-abused majesty. Although she was not herself an intellectual, she knew very well what it was to be one-the real thing. She was a clever woman.

Katrina tried to answer. "The strange carnival is the history of civilization as it strikes a detached mind...."

"We don't play in this league," said Dotey at last. "It's not for types like us, Trina. And your brain is not the organ he's interested in."

"And I believe I'm equal to this, too, in a way of my own," said Katrina, obstinate. Trying to keep the discussion under control. "Types like us" wounded her, and she felt that her eyes were turning turbid. She met the threat of tears, or of sobs, by sinking into what she had always called her "flesh state": her cheeks grew thick, and she felt physically incompetent, gross. Dotey spoke with a harshness acquired from her City Hall father: "I'm just a broad who has to hustle plastic bags to creeps who proposition me." Katrina understood well enough that when Dotey said, "I'm a broad," she was telling her, "That's what you are, too." Then Dotey said, "Don't give me the 'strange carnival' bit." She added, "What about your elephant?"

This was a cheap shot. Katrina had been trying for some time to write a children's story about an elephant. She hoped to make some money by it, and to establish her independence. It had been a mistake to mention this to Dotey. She had done it because it was a story often told in the family. "That old elephant thing that Dad used to tell us? I'm going to put it to use." But for one reason and another she hadn't yet worked out the details. It was mean of Dotey to get at her through the elephant. The Valry discussions at Old Orchard had ended with this dig.

But of course she had to tell Dotey that she was flying to Buffalo, and Dotey, sitting upright with the telephone in her carved Chinese bed, said, "So if any hitch develops, what you'd like is that I should cover for you with Alfred."

"I don't expect it to come to that. Just to be on the safe side, give me a number where I can reach you during the afternoon."

"I have to be all over the city. Compet.i.tors are trying to steal my chemist from me. Without him I'll have to fold. I'm near the breaking point, and I can do without extra burdens. And listen now, Trina, do you really care so much? Suppose the court does give Alfred the kids."

"I won't accept that."

You might not mind too much. Mother's interest in you and me was minimal. She cared more about the pleats in her skirt. To this day, down on Bay Harbor Island, she's like that. You'll say you aren't Mother, but things do rub off."

"What has this got to do with Mother?"

"I'm only reckoning the way people actually do. You aren't getting anywhere with those kids. The house is a burden. Alfred took away all the pretty things. It eats up too much money in maintenance. Suppose Alfred did get custody? You'd move east with all the painters and curators. It would be nothing but arts and letters. Victor's set..."

"There isn't any set."

"There are crowds of people after him. You could insist on being together more openly, because Victor would owe_ you if you lost the kids. While he lasted..."

"In the midst of such conversations, Dotey, I think how often I've heard women say, 'I wish I had a sister.' "

Dorothea laughed. "Women who have sisters don't say it! Well, my way of being a good sister is to come in and turn on all the lights. You put off having children until you were almost too old. Alfred was upset about it. He's a quick-acting decisive type. Jewelers have to be. In his milieu he's somebody. Glance at a diamond, quote you a price. You didn't want kids by him? You tried to keep your options open? You were waiting for the main chance? Naturally Alfred will do you in if he can."

That's right, Katrina commented silently, scare me good. I'll never regret what I've done. She said, "I'd better go and set the alarm clock."

"I'll give you a couple of numbers where you might find me late in the afternoon," said Dorothea.

At five-thirty the alarm went off. Katrina never had liked this black winter hour. Her heart was low as she slid back the closet door and began to dress. To go with the green suit she chose a black cashmere sweater and matching hose. She rolled backward clumsily on the chaise longue, legs in the air, to pull the hose on. Her boots were of ostrich skin and came from the urban cowboy specialty shop on South State Street which catered to Negro dudes and dudesses. The pockmarked leather, roughly smooth and beautiful, was meant for slimmer legs than her own. What did that matter? They-she herself-gave Victor the greatest possible satisfaction.

She had set aside fifteen minutes for the dog. In the winter Ysole wouldn't walk her. At her age a fall on the ice was all she needed. ("Will you_ take care of me if I break my hip?" asked the old woman.) But Katrina liked taking Sukie out. It was partly as Dorothea had said: "Her feet abide not in her house." But the house, from which Alfred had removed the best carpets and chairs, the porcelain elephants from India and the curly gilt Chinese lions, did give Katrina vacancy heartaches. However, she had never really liked housekeeping. She needed action, and there was some action even in dog walking. You could talk to other dog owners. Astonis.h.i.+ng, the things they sometimes said-the kinky proposals that were made. Since she need not take them seriously, she was in a position simply to enjoy them. As for Sukie, she had had it. The vet kept hinting that a sick, blind dog should be put down. Maybe Krieggstein would do her a favor-take the animal to the Forest Preserve and shoot her. Would the little girls grieve? They might or might not. You couldn't get much out of those silent kids. They studied their mother without comment. Krieggstein said they were great little girls, but Katrina doubted that they were the sort of children a friend of the family could dote on. One who belonged to the Golden Age of Plat.i.tudes, maybe. One of Krieggstein's odder suggestions was that the girls be enrolled in a martial arts course; Katrina should encourage them to be more aggressive. Also he tried to persuade Katrina to let him take them to the police pistol-practice range. She said they'd be scared out of their wits by the noise. He insisted on the contrary that it would do them a world of good. Dorothea referred to her nieces as "those mystery kids."

You couldn't hurry the dog. Black-haired, swaybacked, gentle, she sniffed every dog stain in the snow. She circled, then changed her mind. Where to do it? Done in the wrong place, it would unsettle the balance of things. All have their parts to play in the great symphony of the instincts (Victor). And even on a shattering cold day, gritting ice underfoot, the dog took her time. A hoa.r.s.e sun rolled up. For a few minutes the circling snow particles sparkled, and then a wall of cloud came down. It would be a gray day.

Katrina woke the girls and told them to dress and come downstairs for their granola. Mother had to go to a meeting. Kitty from next door would come at eight to walk them to school. The girls seemed hardly to hear her. In what ways are they like me? Katrina sometimes wondered. Their mouths had the same half-open (or half-closed) charm. Victor didn't like to speak of kids. He especially avoided discussing her children. But he did make theoretical observations about the younger generation. He said they had been given a warrant to ravage their seniors with guilt. Kids were considered pitiable because their parents were powerless n.o.bodies. As soon as they were able, they distanced themselves from their elders, whom they considered to be failed children. You would have thought that such opinions would depress Victor. No, he was spirited and cheerful. Not sporadically, either; he had a level temper.

When Katrina, ready to go, came into the kitchen in her fleece-lined coat, the girls were still sitting over their granola. The milk had turned brown while they dawdled. "I'm leaving a list on the bulletin board, tell Ysole. I'll see you after school." No reply. Katrina left the house half unwilling to admit how good it was to go away, how glad she would be to reach O'Hare, how wonderful it would be to make a flight even though Victor, waiting in Buffalo, might be sick.

The jet engines sucked and snarled up the frozen air; the huge plane lifted; the gray ground skidded away and you rose past hangars, over factories, ponds, bungalows, football fields, the st.i.tched incisions of railroad tracks curving through the snow. And then the skysc.r.a.per community to the south. On an invisible sidewalk beneath, your little daughters walking to school might hear the engines, unaware that their mummy overflew them. Now the gray water of the great lake appeared below with all its stresses, wind patterns, whitecaps. Goodbye. Being above the clouds always made Katrina tranquil. Then-_bing!__-the lucid sunlight coming through infinite s.p.a.ce (refrigerated blackness, they said) filled the cabin with warmth and color. In a book by Kandinsky she had once picked up in Victor's room, she had learned that the painter, in a remote part of Russia where the interiors of houses were decorated in an icon style, had concluded that a painting, too, ought to be an interior, and that the artist should induce the viewer to enter in. Who wouldn't rather? she thought. Drinking coffee above the state of Michigan, Katrina had her single hour of calm and luxury. The plane was almost empty.

There were even some thoughts about her elephant project. Would she or wouldn't she finish it?

In Katrina's story the elephant, a female, had been leased as a smart promotional idea to push the sale of Indian toys on the fifth floor of a department store. The animal's trainer had had trouble getting her into the freight elevator. After testing the floor with one foot and finding it shaky, she had balked, but Nirad, the Indian mahout, had persuaded her at last to get in. Once in the toy department she had had a heavenly time. Sales were out of sight. Margey was the creature's name, but the papers, which were full of her, called her Largey. The management was enthusiastic. But when the month ended and Margey-Largey was led again to the freight elevator and made the hoof test, nothing could induce her to enter. Now there was an elephant in the top story of a department store on Wabash Avenue, and no one could think of a way to get her out. There were management conferences and powwows. Experts were called in. Legions of inventive cranks flooded the lines with suggestions. Open the roof and lift out the animal with a crane? Remove a wall and have her lowered by piano movers? Drug her and stow her unconscious in the freight elevator? But how could you pick her up when she was etherized? The Humane Society objected. The circus from which Margey-Largey had been rented had to leave town and held the department store to its contract. Nirad the mahout was frantic. The great creature was in misery, suffered from insomnia. Were there no solutions? Katrina wasn't quite inventive enough to bring it off. Inspiration simply wouldn't come. Krieggstein wondered whether the armed forces might not have a jumbo-sized helicopter. Or if the store had a central gallery or well like Marshall Field's. Katrina after two or three attempts had stopped trying to discuss this with Victor. You didn't pester him with your nonsense. There was a measure of the difference between Victor and Krieggstein.

If he had been sick in earnest, Victor would have canceled the lecture, so he must have sent for her because he longed to see her (the most desirable maximum), or simply because he needed company. These reasonable conclusions made her comfortable, and for about an hour she rode through the bright sky as if she were_ inside a painting. Then, just east of Cleveland, the light began to die away, which meant that the plane was descending. Darkness returned. Beneath her was Lake Erie-an open toilet, she had heard an environmentalist call it. And now the jet was gliding into gray Buffalo, and she was growing agitated. Why was she sent for? Because he was sick and old, in spite of the immortality that he seemed wrapped in, and it was Katrina's fault that he was on the road. He did it for her sake. He didn't travel with a.s.sistants (like Henry Moore or other dignitaries of the same rank) because a s.e.xual romance imposed secrecy; because Alfred was gunning for her-Alfred who had always outcla.s.sed and outsmarted her and who was incensed by this turnaround. And if Alfred were to win his case, Victor would have Katrina on his hands. But would he accept her? She felt it would never come to that.

After landing in Buffalo, she stopped in the ladies' room and when she looked herself over she was far from satisfied with the thickness of her face and her agitated eyes. She put on lipstick (Alfred's rage was burning and smoking on the horizon and she was applying lipstick). She did what she could with her comb and went out to get directions to the first-cla.s.s lounge.

Victor never flew first-cla.s.s-why waste money? He only used the facilities. The executives in first were not his type. He had always lived like an artist, and therefore belonged in the rear cabin. Owing to his b.u.m knee, he did claim early seating, together with nursing infants and paraplegics. No display of infirmity, but he needed an aisle seat for his rigid leg. What was true was that he a.s.sumed a kind of presidential immunity from all inconveniences. For some reason this was especially galling to Dorothea, and she took a Who-the-h.e.l.l-is-he! tone when she said, "He takes everything for granted. When he came to Northwestern-that fatal visit!-he borrowed a jalopy and wouldn't even put out fifty bucks for a battery, but every day phoned some sucker to come with cables and give him a jump. And here's a man who must be worth upward of a million in modern paintings alone."

"I don't know," said Katrina. (At her stubbornest she lowered her eyes, and when she looked as if she were submitting, she resisted most.) "Victor really_ believes in equality. But I don't think that special consideration, in his case, is out of line."

When Victor appeared at a party, true enough, people cleared a path for him, and a ha.s.sock was brought and a drink put in his hand. As he took it, there was no break in his conversation. Even his super-rich friends were glad to put themselves out for him. Cars were sent. Apartments (in places like the Waldorf) were available, of which he seldom availed himself. An old-style Villager, he kept a room to write in on Sullivan Street, among Italian neighbors, and while he was working he would pick up a lump of provolone and sc.r.a.ps from the bread box, drink whiskey or coffee from his Pyrex measuring cup, lie on his bed (the sheets were maybe changed annually) to refine his thoughts, pa.s.sing them through his mind as if the mind were a succession of high-energy chambers. It was the thinking that mattered. He had those thinking dark eyes s.h.i.+ning inside the densely fringed lids, big diabolical brows, authoritative not unkindly. The eyes were set, or let_ into his cheeks, at an odd angle. The motif of the odd angle appeared in many forms. And on Sullivan Street he required no special consideration. He bought his own salami and cheese, cigarettes, in the Italian grocery, carried them to his third-floor walk-up (rear), working until drink time, perfectly independent. Uptown, he might accept a lift in a limousine. In the soundproof gla.s.s cabinet of a Rolls, Katrina had once heard him talking during a half-hour ride downtown with a billionaire Berliner. (Escaped from the n.a.z.is in the thirties with patents for synthetic rubber, he had bought dozens of Matisses, cheap.) Victor was being serious with him, and Katrina had tried to keep track of the subjects covered between Seventy-sixth Street and Was.h.i.+ngton Square: the politics of modern Germany from the Holy Roman Empire through the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact; what surrealist communism had really_ been about; Kiesler's architecture; Hans Hofmann's influence; what limits were set by liberal democracy for the development of the arts. Three or four other wonderful topics she couldn't remember. Various views on the crises in economics, cold war, metaphysics, s.e.xaphysics. The clever, lucky old Berlin Jew, whose head was like a round sourdough loaf, all uneven and dusted with flour, had asked the right questions. It wasn't as if Victor had been singing for his ride. He didn't do that sort ofthing.

Dorothea tried, and tried too hard, to find the worst possible word for Victor. She would say, "He's a Tartuffe."

"You called me Madame Bovary," said Katrina. "What kind of a pair does that make us?"

Dotey, you got your B. A. fair and square. Now stick to plastic bags.

Such comments, tactfully censored, seemed to swell out Katrina's lips. You often saw a sort of silent play about her mouth. Interpreted, it told you that Victor was a real big shot, and that she was proud of-well, of their special intimacy. He confided in her. She knew his true opinions. They were conspirators. She was with him in his lighthearted, quick-moving detachment from everything that people (almost all of them) were attached to. In a public-opinion country, he made his own opinions. Katrina was enrolled as his only pupil. She paid her tuition with joy.

This at least was one possible summary of their relations, the one she liked best.

Pa.s.sing down the gla.s.s-walled corridors of the airport, Katrina didn't like the look of the sky-a kind of colic in the clouds, and snow gusts spitting and twisting on the fields of concrete. Traffic, however, was normal. Planes were rolling in, trundling toward the runways. The look of the sky was wicked, but you didn't want to translate your anxieties into weather conditions. Anyway, the weather was shut out when you entered the VIP lounge. First-cla.s.s lounges were always inner rooms, low-lighted, zones of quiet and repose. Drinks were free, and Victor, holding a gla.s.s, rested his legs on a coffee table. His stick was wedged beside him in sofa cus.h.i.+ons. The action of the whiskey wasn't sufficient, for his yellow-green corduroy car coat was zippered and b.u.t.toned for warmth. As she kissed him the Cabochard fragrance puffed from her dress, scarf, throat-she could smell it herself. Then they looked each other in the face to see what was up. She wouldn't have said that he was sick-he didn't look it, and he didn't have about him the sick flavor that had become familiar to her during his illness. That_ at least! So there was no cause for panic. He was, however, out of sorts, definitely-something was working at him, like vexation, disgust. She knew the power of his silent glooms. Several objects had been deposited at the side of the sofa. His duffel bag she knew; heavy canvas, stained, it might have contained a plumber's tools, but there was something else with it, just around the corner.

Well, I was sent for, and I came. Was I needed, or was it extreme tetchiness?

"Right on the dot," she said, turning her watch on the wrist.

"Good."

"All I have to do is make it back."

"I see no reason why you shouldn't. It didn't give you a lot of trouble to arrange, did it?"

"Only ducking a date with the court psychiatrist, and chancing the usual heat from Alfred."

"Such behavior in this day and age," said Victor. "Why does your husband have to interpose himself as if he_ were a princ.i.p.al, and behave like a grand-opera lunatic?"

"Well, you know, Victor. Alfred always had lots of a.s.surance, but rivalry with you was more than his selfesteem could bear."

Victor was not the type to be interested in personality troubles. Insofar as they were nothing but personal, he cared for n.o.body's troubles. That included his own.

"What have you got there, with your duffel bag?"

"I'll tell you as soon as we've ordered you some whiskey." Early drinking was unusual; it meant he needed an extra boost. When his arm was raised, the signal couldn't be overlooked, and the hostess came right over. In the old Mediterranean or in Asia, you might have found examples of Victor's physical type. He towered. He also tilted, on account of the leg. Katrina had never determined exactly what was the matter with it, medically. For drainage it was punctured in two places, right through the flesh. Sometimes there was a deposit around the holes, and it was granular, like brown sugar. That took getting used to, just a lit-tie. He made jokes about his size. He said he was too big for the subtler human operations. He would point out the mammoths, they hadn't made it, and he would note how many geniuses were little guys. But that was just talk. At heart he was pleased with the way he was. Nothing like a mammoth. He was still one of the most dramatic-looking men in the world, and besides, as she had reason to know, his nervous reactions were very fine. A face like Victor's might have been put on the cover of a book about the ancient world: the powerful horizontal planes-forehead, cheekbones, the intelligent long eyes, the brows kinky with age now, and with tufts that could be wicked. His mouth was large, and the cropped mustache was broad. By the way the entire face expanded when he spoke emphatically, you recognized that he was a kind of tyrant in thought. His cheekbones were red, like those of an actor in makeup; the sharp color hadn't left him even when he was on the critical list. It seemed a mistake that he should be dying. Besides, he was so big that you wondered what he was doing in a bed meant for ordinary patients, but when he opened his eyes, those narrow visual ca.n.a.ls, the message was, "I'm dying!" Still, only a couple of months later he was back in circulation, eating and drinking, writing critical pieces-in full charge. A formidable person, Victor Wulpy. Even the way he gimped was formidable, not as if he was dragging his leg but as if he were kicking things out of the way. All of Victor's respect was reserved for people who lived out their idea._ For whether or not you were aware of it, you had one, high or low, keen or stupid. He came on like the king of something-of the Jews perhaps. By and by, you became aware of a top-and-bottom contrast in Victor; he was not above as he was below. In the simplest terms, his shoes were used up and he wore his pants negligently, but when his second drink had warmed him and he took off the corduroy coat, he uncovered one of his typical s.h.i.+rts. It resembled one of Paul Klee's canvases, those that were filled with tiny rectilinear forms-green, ruby, yellow, violet, washed out but still beautiful. His large trunk was one warm artwork. After all, he was a chieftain and pundit in the art world, a powerful man; even his oddities (naturally) had power. Kingly, artistic, democratic, he had been around forever. He was withering, though. But women were after him, even now.

His voice strengthened by the drink, he began to talk. He said, "Vanessa says her teachers put heat on her to bring me for a lecture, but it was mostly her own idea. Then she didn't attend. She had to play chamber music."

"Did you meet her Cuban boyfriend?"

"I'm coming to that. He's a lot better than the others."

"So there's no more religion?"

"After all the noise about becoming a rabbi, and the trouble of getting her into Hebrew Union College, she dropped out. Her idea seems to have been to boss Jews-adult Jews-in their temples and holler at them from the pulpit.

Plenty of them are so broken-down that they would not only acquiesce but brag about it. Nowadays you abuse people and then they turn around and take ads in the paper to say how progressive it is to be kicked in the face."

"Now she's fallen in love with this Cuban student. Are they still Catholics, under Castro? She books you for a lecture and plays a concert the same night."

"Not only that," said Victor. "She has me carry her violin to Chicago for repairs. It's a valuable instrument, and I have to bring it to Bein and Fus.h.i.+ in the Fine Arts Building. Can't let it be botched in Buffalo. A Guarnerius."

"So you met for breakfast?"

"Yes. And then I was taken to meet the boy's family. He turns out to be a young Archimedes type, a prodigy. They're refugees, probably on welfare. Fair enough, that among all the criminals the Cubans stuck us with there should be a genius or two...."

"By the way, are you sure he's such a genius?"

"You can't go by me. He got a fat four-year scholars.h.i.+p in physiology. His brothers are busboys, if that. And that's where Nessa is meddling. The mother is in a state."

"Then she gave you her violin-an errand to do?"

"I accepted to avoid something worse. I paid a fair price for the instrument and by now it's quintupled in value. I want an appraisal from Bein and Fus.h.i.+, just in case it enters Nessa's head to sell the fiddle and buy this Raul from his mother. Elope. Who knows what.... We can go to Bein together."

More errands for Katrina. Victor had sent Vanessa away to avoid a meeting with his lady friend, his Madame Bovary.

"We can lay the fiddle under a seat. I suppose that leftwing students came to your talk."

"Why so? I had a bigger crowd than that. The application of The Eighteenth Brumaire_ to American politics and society... the farce of the Second Empire. Very timely."

"It doesn't sound too American to me."

"What, more exotic than j.a.panese electronics, German automobiles, French cuisine? Or Laotian exiles settled in Kansas?"

Yes, she could see that, and see also how the subject would appear natural to Victor Wulpy from New York, of East Side origin, a street boy, sympathetic to mixed, immigrant and alien America; broadly tolerant of the Cuban boyfriend; exotic himself, with a face like his, and the Greek cap probably manufactured in Taiwan.

Victor had gone on talking. He was telling her now about a note he had received at the hotel from a fellow he had known years ago-a surprise that did not please him. "He takes the tone of an old chum. Wonderful to meet again after thirty years. He happens to be in town. And good old Greenwich Village-I hate the revival of these relations.h.i.+ps that never were. Meantime, it's true, he's become quite a celebrity."

"Would I know the name?"

"Larry Wrangel. He had a recent success with a film called The Kronos Factor._ Same type as 2001_ or Star Wars._ "

"Of course," said Katrina. "That's the Wrangel who was featured in People_ magazine. A late-in-life success, they called him. Ten years ago he was still making p.o.r.no movies. Interesting." She spoke cautiously, having disgraced herself in San Francisco. Even now she couldn't be sure that Victor had forgiven her for dragging him to see _M*ASH.__ Somewhere in his mental accounts there was a black mark still. Bad taste approaching criminality, he had once said. "He must be very rich. The piece in People_ said that his picture grossed four hundred million. Did he attend your lecture?"

"He wrote that he had an engagement, so he might be a bit late, and could we have a drink afterward. He gave a number, but I didn't call."

"You were what-tired? disgruntled?"

"In the old days he was bearable for about ten minutes at a time-just a character who longed to be taken seriously. The type that bores you most when he's most earnest. He came from the Midwest to study philosophy at NYU and he took up with the painters at the Cedar Bar and the writers on Hudson Street. I remember him, all right-a little guy, quirky, shrewd, offbeat. I think he supported himself by writing continuity for the comic books-Buck Rogers, Batman, Flash Gordon. He carried a scribbler in his zipper jacket and jotted down plot ideas. I lost track of him, and I don't care to find the track again-Trina, I was disturbed by some discoveries I made about my invitation from the Executives a.s.sociation."

"What is this about the Executives?"

"I found out that a guy named Bruce Beidell is the main adviser to the speakers committee, and it turns out that he was the one who set up the invitation, and saw to it that I'd be told. He knows I don't like him. He's a rat, an English Department academic who became a culture politician in Was.h.i.+ngton. In the early Nixon years he built big expectations on Spiro Agnew; he used to tell me that Agnew was always studying serious worthy books, asking him for bigger and better cla.s.sics. Reading! To read Beidell's mind you'd need a proctoscope. Suddenly I find that he'll be on the panel tonight, one of the speakers. And that's not all. It's even more curious. The man who will introduce me is Ludwig Felsher. The name won't mean much to you, but he's an old old-timer. Before 1917 there was a group of Russian immigrants in the U.S., and Lenin used some of these people after the revolution to do business for him-Armand Hammer types who made ingenious combinations of big money with Communist world politics and became colossally rich. Felsher brought over masterpieces from the Hermitage to raise currency for the Bolsheviks. Duveen and Berenson put in a cheap bid for those treasures." Victor had been personally offended by Berenson and detested him posthumously.

"So you're in bad company. You never do like to share the platform."

He used both hands to move his leg to a more comfortable position. After this effort he was very sharp. "I've been among pimps before. I can bear it. But it's annoying to appear with these p.r.i.c.ks. For a few thousand bucks: contemptible. I know this Felsher. From GPU to KGB, and his standing with American capitalists is impeccable. He's old, puffy bald, red in the face, looks like an unlanced boil. No matter who you are, if you've got enough dough you'll get bear hugs from the chief executive. You've made campaign contributions, you carry unofficial messages to Moscow, and you're hugged in the Oval Office."

Fretful. Fallen among thieves. That was why he had sent for her, not because he suddenly suspected a metastasis.

"I'll hate seeing Beidell. Nothing but a fish bladder in his head, and the rest of him all malice and intrigue. Why are these corporation types so dumb?"

Katrina encouraged him to say more. She crossed her booted legs and offered him a listening face. Her chin was supported on bent fingers.

"Under these auspices, I don't mind telling you my teeth are on edge," he said.

"But, Victor, you could turn the tables on them all. You could let them have it."

Naturally he could. If he had a mind to. It would take a lot out of him, though. But he was not one of your (nowadays) neurotic, gutless, conniving intellectual types. From those he curtly dissociated himself. Katrina saw him in two aspects, mainly. In one aspect Victor reminded her comically of the huge bad guy in a silent Chaplin movie, the bully who bent gas lamps in the street to light his cigar and had huge greasepaint eyebrows. At the same time, he was a person of intensest delicacy and of more shadings than she would ever be able to distinguish. More and more often since he became sick, he had been saying that he needed to save his strength for what mattered. And did those executives matter? They didn't matter a d.a.m.n. The Chase Manhattan, World Bank, National Security Council connections meant zilch to him, he said. He hadn't sought them_ out. And it wasn't as if they didn't know his views. He had more than once written, on the subject announced for tonight, that true personality was not to be found at the top of either hierarchy, East or West. Between them the superpowers had the capacity to kill everybody, but there was no evidence of higher human faculties to be found in the top leaders.h.i.+p. On both sides power was in the hands of comedians and pseudopersons. The neglect, abas.e.m.e.nt, dismissal of art was a primary cause of this degeneration. If Victor were sufficiently fired up, the executives would hear bold and unusual things from him about the valuing of life when it was bound up with the active valuing of art. But he was ailing, ruffled; his mind was tarnished. This was the condition of Victor himself. He was thinking that he shouldn't even be here. What was he doing here in the Buffalo airport in midwinter? In this lounge? Bound for Chicago? He was not at the exact center of his own experience on days like this. There were sensations which should absolutely be turned off. And he couldn't do that, either. He felt himself being held hostage by oblique, unidentifiable forces.

He said, "One agreeable recollection I do have of this man Wrangel. He played the fiddle in reverse. Being left-handed, he had the instrument restrung, the sound posts moved. Back then, it was important to have your little specialty. He went a long way, considering the small scale of his ingenuity. Became a big-time illusionist."

The attendant had brought Katrina a small bottle of Dewar's. Pouring it, she held the gla.s.s to the light to look at the powerful spirit of the spirit, like a spiral, finer than smoke. Then she said, "It may do some good to look at the notes 1 typed for you."

"Yes, let's."