6. More Die of Heartbreak, by Saul Bellow, pp. 164-191

From "Here I could pay myself a compliment..." through "... It's like the Yeats poem: 'Many times I died, / Many times I rose again.'"

_____

Kenneth goes to see Vilitzer's son Fishl, who broke with his father fifteen years ago and has been making his way, more or less, on his own. Among his careers was as as an abortionist, using acupuncture to serve his clients. But he was sued by a woman who had a baby after going through the procedure.

You can always count on litigation. A Philadelphia jury has just awarded big damages to a lady who was robbed of her psychic powers after undergoing a CAT scan. After long years as a medium, she was forced to close up shop. Say what you like about America, but few countries have welcomed originality more warmly, and never before has it been a mass phenomenon. 

Kenneth is driven to Fishl's office by his friend Dita Schwartz, who "had an eye on me, that couldn't be denied for one moment," though Kenneth is still holding out for Treckie. The office is in an old, rundown building along with other strange little firms, including a taxidermist and a homeopathic pharmacist. It "shared a corner of the corridor with a men's lavatory." Fishl and Kenneth scrutinize each other: "What he observed was a member of the family; age thirty-five; education foreign; communication powers mediocre-to-low; hearing impaired; not stupid but hampered by singular preoccupations."

When he asks Fishl if he knows the judge who performed the ceremony for Matilda and Benn, and tells him it was Amador Chetnik, Fishl is surprised, but comments: "They might have stopped scheming for at least fifteen minutes, those people. That old Layamon -- I've heard about him. They say he's got more angles than the geometry book." He goes on to explain what we have already learned from Kenneth's report on Benn's lunch with Layamon: that Chetnik is under investigation by the U.S. attorney and that Layamon is using both Chetnik and Benn against Vilitzer. Like Layamon, Fishl says that the reason Kenneth's mother lost her suit against Vilitzer is the incompetence of her lawyer.

Fishl compares the course of his life to Benn's. They knew each other in college, where they tried to get a patent for a lightweight, collapsible bicycle made of bamboo. "Inventing a a bamboo bike was merely his entertainment. Making a killing was my motive." But Benn was blessed with much better luck than Fishl:  "Benn stepped out at a higher level without looking right or left, as if walking out of a fiftieth-story window, and he never got hurt." He goes on to explain that Chetnik is really a pawn in the U.S. attorney's hands in an effort to get at Harold Vilitzer.

"Now, suppose that Chetnik tells the truth about the Electronic Tower case.... You can finish the sentence for me."

"Old Layamon can reopen it, and recover millions for Uncle Benn.... Millions for Benn means million for Matilda. That's why Chetnik was invited to tie the knot."

"Look, chum. I'm the unhappy Edgar, cursed by old Gloucester, his father. That's why I'm in this shit-house office while my brothers are up in pig heaven.... My dad has never been exactly a good guy, but I'm his son and long to save him. Be reconciled. Behind it all is Donovan Stewart.... Governor Stewart, of our own state. In his time he was the U.S. attorney here, and every single successor has been one of the young guys from his original team. Guess for yourself whether or not Stewart has influence on the present incumbent."

So if Chetnik makes an immunity deal for testimony against Vilitzer, he can get, Fishl explains, "A reduced sentence, plus he gets to keep his boodle, and maybe a fast parole deal. Maybe also a cut of what Benn can recover from Dad."

Kenneth assures Fishl that Benn really isn't interested in getting money out of Vilitzer: "he didn't marry for wealth, just for beauty." Fishl is skeptical, but points out that Matilda may be interested in buying a seat on the stock exchange -- he has heard rumors to that effect: "There's a mad search for gifted women." The firm of Fingal Brothers and Hockney is said to be interested in Matilda: "It's a mutual fund. She'd need some training ... but it does them credit to have a lady wizard in an executive spot." When Kenneth reiterates that Benn isn't interested in money, Fishl replies, "Sounds like the lady acquired him.... Would you put it past Dr. Layamon to have had this in mind from way back? After all, Electronic Tower is big stuff. Worth having a shot at that kind of money."

Kenneth protests that Matilda "could have easily married rich," but Fishl suggests that by marrying Benn she could have that and more:

"But a famous professor is always a good catch for a woman who doesn't like vulgar society. The best husband for most women is a composite.... Candid women will tell you, I'd like some of this and some of that -- a little Muhammad Ali for straight sex, some of Kissinger for savvy, Cary Grant for looks, Jack Nicholson for entertainment, plus André Malraux or some Jew for brains. Commonest fantasy there is.... Now she's Mrs. Benno Crader, and she can draw interesting people to her set.... Her father isn't giving away a thing, that's his reputation, and think how thrilling it would be to turn the son-in-law into a millionaire, which he might have done himself if he hadn't been such a creepo." 

Fishl proposes to make contact with his father and find out where he fits into all this. "Above all, tell your uncle not to go to my dad on his own. Warn him against it." Kenneth realizes that "Fishl was setting himself to engage and outmaneuver Dr. Layamon, Judge Amador Chetnik, and even -- in a remote perspective -- Governor Stewart, who allegedly managed all the grand juries in this federal district. Fishl had the nerve to consider himself a match for these stars, this killers' row."

He returns to where Dita had agreed to pick him up. She tells him she had been to see a dermatologist. "She said this lightly, so I didn't guess that she had anything serious in mind (for instance, an attempt to change her looks so that she could rival Treckie).  I was so much involved with Uncle Benn, the riddle of the Roanoke, the grand juries, and the rest of it, that I was slow to understand the signals Dita was giving."

Returning to his office, he finds a note from his uncle, "At home, this P.M." He realizes that this means Benn's old apartment and goes to see him there. Kenneth doesn't tell him everything that he and Fishl talked about. When he suggests that Benn could say no to everything: to moving into the Roanoke and to the maneuvers with Vilitzer, Benn replies, "How can I? I have a certain obligation to Matilda... I can't tell her that she has to lead the dull life of a professor's wife." Kenneth realizes that because of his own relationship with Treckie, he doesn't have much to say that wouldn't sound like hypocrisy.

When he urges Benn to let Fishl handle his father, Benn resists: "I prefer to do it myself, if it has to be done at all.... I can't think of a single thing that Fishl ever succeeded in." Moreover, he has a new perspective on the matter:

"Everything looks different from Parrish Place. I've never lived so close to the center of things. And every time I come near a window, I see that goddam skyscraper. My old life is lying under it -- my mother's kitchen, my father's bookshelves, the mulberry trees. It's like one of those drowned villages in the TVA valley, where you'd have to be a scuba diver to revisit your childhood."

Kenneth is convinced, however, that Fishl is on the right track and that Benn is just playing into the hands of the Layamons. He reflects again on what his uncle "said to the newsman who interviewed him on the dangers of radioactivity from Three Mile Island and Chernobyl -- something like: 'Sorrow at heart killeth full many a man.' And it's a safe guess that there are more deaths from heartbreak than from atomic radiation. Yet there are no mass movements against heartbreak, and no demonstrations against it in the streets." 

But most of all, he hates to see his uncle "used against Harold Vilitzer."

5. More Die of Heartbreak, by Saul Bellow, pp. 132-163

From "The problem was not with opulence and luxury ..." through "... The rest follows from this."

_____

Mrs. Layamon, Benn tells Kenneth, has a "sanctum" in which she "tapes poetry for people in nursing homes." It also contains a splendid azalea, which to Benn's regret is off-limits to him. Matilda, he says, sleeps late and wakes "snappish, morose," which is a bit of a trial for him, "liveliest when he woke up." She also dislikes his friendliness with the servants. But Benn, familiar with the alien through his work with plants, takes it in stride, Kenneth observes:

For all I know, he viewed her as a sheaf of ferns bound up in the satin edging of the  eiderdown, and expanding at the top, fronds of long hair coming down over shut eyes. But then he hadn't married a plant. Matilda might remind you of a fern or a lily of the field, and maybe the plant element was strong in her -- the trouble she had waking suggested a struggle between the two natures -- but she did wake, however reluctantly, and came out at last in her gorgeous housecoat, a brocade of Far Eastern design. 

For Benn, one major problem with staying at the Layamons is the looming presence of the Electronic Tower that sat now on the neighborhood where he was raised and is a constant reminder of his being cheated by Vilitzer. Mrs. Layamon referred to the tower as an "important piece of modern beauty," but Benn keeps his silence about his opinion of it. He does venture a comment that the house that the tower replaced had two very fine mulberry trees. "Expressive looks passed among the Layamons. Uncle was aware of these but interpreted them as signs of boredom. There he was definitely wrong, as we shall see."

Matilda and her mother busy themselves "with bridal registry choices, deciding between Lalique and Baccarat and also linens and kitchenware. A more experienced housekeeper than either of them, Benn had ideas of his own about pots and pans and dishwashers.... However, he wasn't consulted, nor did he try to put in his two cents." He even goes shopping with Matilda and keeps his mouth shut when she buys a dishwasher, even though he knows that for a hundred dollars more they could get one "a thousand times better."

Kenneth comes to dinner one evening at the Layamons to watch his uncle "in the role of the botanical professor bridegroom and son-in-law -- Dr. Chlorophyll." He is able to see for himself the view of the Electronic Tower: "It drew close in the night, a mass of lighted windows bigger than the Titanic, and the fiery masts like a sign to the children of Israel."

Benn goes to the Roanoke to measure the rooms in the apartment Matilda had inherited from her aunt, and confirms Kenneth's "Venetian palace comparison." The rooms had been shut up for a year and "smelled like sickrooms." He wanted to ask Matilda if her aunt had "been incontinent? Did she keep cats or dogs?" But he doesn't. "All I could say was that it was pretty lavish." She does strike the right note when him when she points out that "the windows look straight into the treetops" -- a stand of sycamores.

A true plant man diffused his personal essence into leaves, internal tissues, and sent himself from the root-clutched soil to the highest extremities. As if talking to himself he spoke of forces from the center of the planet, akin to grief, driving green impulses to the surface and into the sun, which act was applauded by the leaves. I'm not sure he actually knew what he was saying. He trusted me enough to ramble, to put unaccountable thoughts, inadmissible notions, into words. 

But Benn's main concern about the apartment is the expense of remodeling and furnishing it. When he ventures to suggest an economy, she replies, "'No, dear.' ... This 'dear,' the 'dear' of contradiction, was laid down like a cement block." He comes to realize that "the Roanoke wasn't simply an apartment. You couldn't just live in it. If you tried, you'd decay.... You had to give parties here -- dinners, private concerts -- otherwise the surroundings would have a disembodying effect on you and pretty soon you'd be a spook, haunting the pantry." Matilda envisions it as a place for a salon: "Visitors passing through, people like Dobrynin, Kissinger, Marilyn Horne, ballet dancers, Günter Grass -- on the road, and no better place to kill an evening -- would discover a civilized haven."

Again, the expense troubles Benn: "This fifteen-room leviathan will swallow my whole salary, and then some." Matilda tells him not to worry:

"Naturally I've considered this from all sides," she said, smiling. "I thought it would appeal more to the Don Quixote in you."

Benn said, "Quixote was a bachelor."

"I meant that the irrationality of it might appeal to you." 

He suggests that they could "fix up the front, the showy part, and you and I can live in the rear," but that, too, is dismissed by Matilda. He tells Kenneth, "It's a three-cornered match: Matilda, me and the Roanoke. I hadn't realized that. Well, how could anybody, beforehand?" But to ease his concern about finances, she sets up a lunch with her father to talk about them.

Kenneth considers "the facts as I then knew them: A beautiful woman unites herself with a world-famous botanist. He may think it will serve his needs. No, all the while she has been thinking what she can do with him." And before Benn's lunch with Dr. Layamon, he suggests that his uncle ask about the judge who performed the wedding ceremony. Benn promises to do so.

The lunch takes place at a pretentious restaurant "on the seventy-fifth floor of one of the newest high-rises." The doctor indulges in medical talk, including the way he counsels aging patients on impotence, which provokes Benn to ask, "Okay, William, why are you telling me about hormones or inflating the genital? You think I'm going to make you some medical confession?" But he learns that the doctor already knows what he needs to know about him: "we ran a little check on you, purely private and absolutely discreet." The news is somewhat unsettling. As if to compensate, the doctor tells him that when Matilda was born, "we physicians had to puzzle over the baby. Was it a boy or a girl?" Benn assures him "she's a woman through and through."

Finally, Benn gets around to asking Kenneth's question: "I want to know why you brought in that Chetnik man to perform the ceremony." He's "an old family friend," Layamon replies, and when Benn says, "He was the judge in our case against Vilitzer," Layamon says he was aware of that, too. Finally, the doctor reveals that he was expecting the question. He had persuaded Matilda to have the judge do the ceremony, and after more back-and-forth on the matter, including a revelation that Amador Chetnik is "changing loyalties," Layamon comes out with the truth:

"Well, as you will have figured, with a brain like yours, the object is to recover money from Uncle Harold. That's the overall game plan."

"For the purpose of refitting the Roanoke palazzo?"

"Right! And then some."

A U.S. attorney is investigating Chetnik, who is ready to name Vilitzer in exchange for leniency. Layamon wants Benn to approach his uncle to discuss terms. If the attorney can put Vilitzer in jail, that will advance his political aims: "a clear path to the U.S. Senate. Or you become governor and you're even mentioned for the presidency." So if Benn threatens to reopen his case against Vilitzer, the threat of investigation will provide some leverage for Vilitzer to settle. It all becomes clear to Benn: "And with Amador Chetnik, now going in reverse, coaching us on the legal side. Yes, I get it. And this was why you asked the judge to unite Matilda and me."

But Benn also insists, "I don't want to harm Vilitzer -- he's my uncle. Sure he's been rough. Still, he's my uncle -- he's Mama's brother." Layamon retorts, "The main consideration is justice. You were gypped out of millions. And it turns out that your new family is protecting your rights, and by rights you should be set up in a place like the Roanoke." He tells Benn that he should ask Vilitzer for five million dollars, "ready to come down to three. I'd estimate his total net worth at a hundred million." Layamon says he should do it for Matilda, who "wants a brilliant position for herself, no more than a woman like that is entitled to." And he can't do it on his salary.

"If you're going to share the bed of this delicious girl of high breeding and wallow in it, you'll have o find the money it takes. And it so happens that the single most valuable piece of real estate in this town was your property until five years ago, when you were screwed out of it, chum. We think you can be made whole. So here goes."

4. More Die of Heartbreak, by Saul Bellow, pp. 104-132

From "I had gone to see my mother in East Africa ..." through "...Which side do you think I'm from?"

_____

Benn's marriage took Kenneth completely by surprise: When his uncle drove him to the airport for his trip to see his mother in Africa, Benn had made no mention of Matilda, or even of the fact that he was seeing her, even though Kenneth had introduced him to her. Kenneth's feelings are hurt, and he behaves like a jilted girlfriend. "Somewhere, I'm still sore because he cheated on me -- broke the rules of our relationship."

Kenneth's mother is surprised by the marriage, too, but she uses it as an occasion to warn him against his "tendency to imitate" his uncle, telling him: "Treckie would not be a suitable wife. She belongs to the Ken Kesey acid culture and all that craziness which is now passé and doesn't yet realize it." But she rubs salt in his wound by saying that "now your uncle will need you much less than formerly." Kenneth is convinced that "Uncle had never needed me so badly as now."

Matilda had come to Paris to do research for her Ph.D. thesis, which is where Kenneth's mother had become acquainted with her. When she returned home, she made contact with Kenneth and through him with Benn.

She was now in her thirties, had never been married, was not too old to have children, and what she was looking for was a husband. It never entered my mind that Uncle Benn might be thought a candidate for matrimony by this glittering, nervous, French-Midwestern woman.

As it turned out, she was the one who asked Benn to keep their relationship secret. "I might be a dear person, and obviously Uncle doted on me, but nobody could deny that I was a bit on the weird side and notorious for the kinkiness of my theories. Even Mother had hinted (more than hinted) that I was somewhat unstable." Benn describes the places where he used to meet Matilda, and Kenneth recognizes them as "Places where you'd never run into me." Benn denies that he was responsible for that, so Kenneth puts the blame on Matilda.

Benn is staying with Matilda and her parents "in their duplex penthouse, at the peak of a newly constructed building in what passes in this town for a 'fine old neighborhood' -- a cluster of residential condominiums, many of them tawny pink." Kenneth is convinced that his "uncle had no business in such a location." They meet in Kenneth's room in one of the university dormitories, a "bare, devoid-of-comforts place."

Benn tells Kenneth that he is staying with the Layamons temporarily before he and Matilda leave for their honeymoon in Brazil. Kenneth reminds him that he "didn't like Brazil the first time," to which Benn replies, "You'd have to be pretty spoiled to reject such a big piece of the continent," and that Matilda wants to go "To escape the winter. To honeymoon in a warm climate." Kenneth adds, "'Also, to have you to herself for two or three months.' I didn't add: 'To cut me out.'" After they return, they will be moving into a co-op called the Roanoke, which Matilda's aunt left to her in her will. "The Roanoke! Sixteen Venetian palaces piled on top of one another in a towering heap," Kenneth says in astonishment tinged with distaste.

I took the trouble of recording Benn's conversations from his other life (the Layamon one) as he reported them to me, and I've kept the notes. At first he was reserved, intent on making an impression. With time, however, he began to go into greater detail, consistent with his habit of mind.... When he described the wedding ceremony to me, he mentioned that it had been performed near the Layamons' Christmas tree. Although dusted with plastic snow, the tree itself was real. It was a balsam fir, and to this bristling little plant he connected himself somehow. It was like a sister to the bridegroom, the nearest thing to a relative standing up at his wedding.... If while he and Matilda were being united by the judge Benn closed his eyes and swayed slightly, it was because his imagination was enlarging in his head the heavily cutinized epidermis of the needle leaves -- the stomata beneath the surface, the mesophyll, the trabecular projections, the resin canals, the procambium.

Kenneth asks if Vilitzer had been invited, and Benn admits that he was on the guest list though he didn't attend. But he reveals that the judge who performed the ceremony was also the judge, Amador Chetnik, who presided over the trial when Kenneth's mother sued Vilitzer. "At this, my legs dropped off the recliner and I sat upright and turned my head to hear better." He tells Benn that he hopes that the choice of "One of Vilitzer's stable of judges" wasn't his new father-in-law's idea of a joke. "Doctor is a sort of humorist," Benn replies. "He isn't a smooth type at all. But it may have a tactical meaning we can't see yet. Fence mending of some kind."

The Layamons, Benn says, are "definitely friendly" toward him. Mrs. Layamon is "only eight years my senior, about the same age as your mother. Instead of a son-in-law I might be her brother." Dr. Layamon has, in addition to the twelve-room penthouse, a house in Palm Springs, and plays golf with Bob Hope and Gerald Ford. Norman Lear had had them to dinner, and Layamon felt obliged to make a contribution to the American Civil Liberties Union, "As payola." The Layamons had expected Matilda to choose "a husband form any of these spheres. According to Doctor, she passed up a national network anchorman, then a fellow who was now on the federal appeals bench, plus a tax genius consulted by Richard Nixon. The list was fairly long.... Matilda just naturally drew men."

Dr. Layamon is convinced that she

had brains enough to be chief executive officer of a blue-chip corporation. With her mentality you could manage NASA. When Mondale announced for the presidency she sent him a campaign blueprint, and if he had been smart enough to put her in charge he might be in the White House now. Her head is like a computer bank, and all she ever used it for was to contrive more personal trouble, a migraine for her parents, lasting more than three decades. On the chance that there would be less trouble to get into in higher education, they sent her to the best institutions. As a result she has more degrees than a thermometer -- all useless, worth shit.

Layamon, Benn says, has a way of giving compliments and then undermining them. "He complimented Benn on his eminence in botany," and then would make some remark about what a shame it was that he hadn't had his teeth straightened. And in the restroom he inspected Benn's genitals while they were urinating. "His comment was: 'Fire-fighting equipment seems adequate, anyway.'" Matilda later told Benn that she had noticed how quickly her father had followed him to the men's room: "Genitals are a common fixation among doctors."

But Benn also insists, "I am happy with this woman."