8. More Die of Heartbreak, by Saul Bellow, pp. 211-249

From "In his old apartment next afternoon ..." through "... 'Take care,' I said."

_____

Kenneth and Benn meet in Benn's old apartment, where Benn tells his nephew about his meeting with Layamon at the hospital: The doctor hadn't finished his rounds and gave Benn a white coat and told him to pretend to be his associate. The patients were all old women, and Benn was so embarrassed at being there as Layamon examined them that he began to have cardiac arrhythmia. "I felt very bad about the old ladies, and how awful they'd have felt if they had known I was just there for laughs, as Doctor intended by this prank."

But the thing that struck him in particular was, when he was walking behind Layamon, "From the shoulders alone you could identify him as Matilda's dad.... seen from behind, they're alike in build." This seems insignificant to Kenneth, who is more interested in what the doctor told him about the Vilitzer case. Benn says that the doctor wants him to confront Vilitzer: "I'm supposed to say that my father-in-law believes I was short-changed and that I feel the question should be reopened." Benn is upset by the whole thing: "Goddamn these bastards, will they never stop fighting about money! All I wanted was to settle down with an affectionate wife, in a civilized style." He suggested that he could write Vilitzer a letter, but Layamon insisted that nothing should be put in writing, that they'll find a way to arrange a meeting, and that he shouldn't wait for Fishl to talk to his father: "You're leaving for Brazil in less than a week, and besides, Fishl is a wimp and disowned by his old man."

So Benn has agreed. Vilitzer is a member of the state parole board, and an open hearing on a case is scheduled for the next Friday. Benn wants his nephew to come with him and approach Vilitzer there. This goes against what Fishl has advised, but Kenneth reluctantly agrees.

Benn now tells Kenneth what had so disturbed him when he recognized the physical resemblance between Matilda and her father. During the fall, while Kenneth was away in Paris and East Africa, Benn and Matilda had spent a week in the Berkshires. One evening Matilda was bored and suggested that they go see Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho at a theater that was showing classic films. Benn had disliked the movie when he first saw it, and liked it even less this time. "It was a phony. I hated it. I hate all that excitement without a focus. Nothing but conditioned reflexes they've trained you into." Matilda, however, loved it. But the scene that made the greatest impression on Benn was the murder of the detective, Arbogast:



When he saw the figure of Tony Perkins as Mrs. Bates emerge and stab Arbogast, Benn noticed that the "shoulders were stiff and high, unnaturally wide for a woman.... Identification was instantaneous. That person seen from the rear was Matilda. this was as conclusive as it was quick. For Benn it would always be what it was at first sight." 

In fact Benn -- or maybe Bellow, who didn't have the benefit of YouTube to check -- has remembered the scene imperfectly. Mrs. Bates is not seen as "a static figure that waited on the landing." We see only the door to her room opening, and see her figure only fleetingly as she attacks Arbogast. And she is wearing a calico house dress, not the "long Victorian skirt, and .. shirtwaist of dark calico stretched over her shoulders." Nor is her appearance in the scene long enough for us to identify those shoulders as "stiff and high, unnaturally wide for a woman." But the misremembrance is telling: Benn has complained that Hitchcock's film is "Nothing but conditioned reflexes they've trained you into." His memory of the scene suggests that he has conditioned himself to see Matilda in the murderous Mrs. Bates. He struggles against this impression.

But merging Matilda with Tony Perkins playing a psychopath -- that was a deadly move. No harm meant, not really. It came from a greater depth and seemed to paralyze Benn. "I couldn't distance myself from it," he said. This wasn't one of your fleeting memory squibs, or flirting, playing with horror; it was serious. The woman was his fiancée. The wedding was planned, invitations were being engraved. And this vision in the movie house told him not to marry her.

He tries to dismiss the movie as "box-office crap" and "trash," but he's unable. "He couldn't escape the sense that he had committed a crime." Adding to this sense of guilt, when they reach their car they discover the headlights don't work, and there are no open garages. They start for home driving slowly and using their flashers, but are forced to stop by a man who gets out of his car, "cursing. 'You shit-ass! You prick! You queer!'" Matilda is angry and tells Benn that he doesn't have to take the abuse, but he tells her he's drunk and perhaps dangerous. She retorts, "Backing down under threats is a Holocaust mentality." They wind up going back to the town, paying a fine, and spending the night in a hotel. But even when they learn that the man who stopped and cursed them is a deputy sheriff, Matilda still wants to accuse him of being drunk. Benn tells Kenneth, "maybe she was being virile for me, since I was too schmucky to do battle for myself."

Kenneth observes, "Practically from on high (though Alfred Hitchcock and Tony Perkins were the effective agents), he had been told, 'Don't marry her. She's not the woman of your heart.'" He sees Benn as "burdened, bowed to the ground by the weight of Matilda Layamon's shoulders, which were heavier than solid bronze."

Dita has invited Kenneth to dinner. "She wasn't yet well enough to be seen in a restaurant, and on these winter evenings I was her only company. Next Monday her sick leave ended and she was going back to work." He has an expensive bottle of wine his father has given him. First he stops to check his voicemail, which includes a message from Fishl that his father is flying up for "some kind of business" and that Benn shouldn't approach him until Fishl has prepared the way. Kenneth, who knows about the parole board meeting already, reflects that it's too late: Layamon has already given Benn press passes for the hearing. The other message is from Tanya Sterling, who still wants Kenneth to accept her "proposition" -- to marry her and seek custody of his daughter -- and tells him that she's hired a private investigator in Seattle. "She was making a bid to take me over, just as Matilda had taken over Uncle. The very thing that Caroline Bunge had attempted."

But he is still somewhat attracted to Dita Schwartz.

A woman with a well-developed figure, she had lips of the Moorish type, a nose perhaps fuller than my own criterion for noses could come to terms with and a solid face with nothing masculine in its solidity. Excepting some negligible defects, she was terribly handsome. Her skin was almost healed -- an ice rink scarred by skate blades, was my figure for it. The scars would presently go away.

He tells her that he and Benn are going to the parole hearing, having been given press passes, which surprises her because the case being heard is big news: It involves a man named Sickle, who has been serving time for the rape of a young woman named Danae Cusper. She has recanted her testimony against him after some kind of religious conversion.

They talk about Benn and Matilda, and Kenneth drinks rather more of the wine he has brought -- she prefers boilermakers -- than perhaps he should. He retells, once again, Fishl's observation about what women want: "No real person has everything they dream of, so they assemble parts and elements from here and there -- a large cock, a sparkling personality, millions of dollars, a bold brilliant spirit like Malraux, the masculine attraction of Clark Gable in Gone With the Wind, the manners of a French aristocrat, the brain of a superman in physics." (The list takes on a slightly different configuration each time.) But he doesn't spend the night with her.

7. More Die of Heartbreak, by Saul Bellow, pp. 192-210

From "Choosing a bright day ..." through "... its rear fumes giving me a diesel headache."

_____

Kenneth and his uncle visit the observation deck on the hundred-and-second story of the Electronic Tower. They are high above the site of Benn's old neighborhood, but he's not inclined to comment on that: "The single remark Benn did pass was about his father's death, somewhere under us, twenty years ago."

And for a time, Kenneth, too, is detached from his uncle's current concerns. He has received a note from Treckie's mother, Tanya Sterling, who will be in town and wants to see him. Figuring he'd better consult Treckie before this encounter, he telephones her in Seattle, but a man answers. "With interpretive skills sharpened by suspicion and jealousy, I judged that the fellow was in the middle of his supper, and Treckie was called away from the gas range." He also deduces that "the man was well established there.... I never had been invited to a meal by Treckie in Seattle." He avoids questioning her about the man, however, and asks instead about her mother's invitation. Tanya, she tells him, has just returned from five years in Costa Rica ("She was playing out a romance with some Robert Vesco type the government hasn't been able to extradite") and paid her a visit in Seattle. Treckie has no problem with his meeting with her, so he calls the Marriott and leaves a message for Tanya.

Meanwhile, he is taking care of Dita Schwartz. "Owing to an adolescent case of acne, her face was uneven with scar tissue and deeply white," so she has located a dermatologist "who made her a price to remove the top layers of dead skin right in his office, under a local anesthetic." He picks up Dita at the man's office, and finds her swathed in bandages and beginning to faint with pain as the anesthetic wears off. "The torments and martyrdoms to which women submit their bodies, the violent attacks they make on their own long-hated faults or imagined deformities! Gladly assaulting themselves. The desperate remedy. The poor grinding their faces."

So for the several weeks of Dita's recovery, Kenneth plays nursemaid and housekeeper for Dita. "In the end, Dita didn't have a new face. The extreme pallor went away; the coarse weave, however, remained. It mattered less now, for if the experiment didn't succeed, there was a broader relationship between us, we were on a more intimate footing."

He meets Treckie's mother in the bar at the Marriott. "Mrs. Sterling was a youthful woman, relatively. She immediately said, 'I was a child bride,' a statement in which there was an implied carryover. She was still a sexual woman." She tells him that she had lost touch with Treckie during her stay in Costa Rica, and hadn't even known she had a granddaughter until she visited her. When he tells her he had spoken to Treckie after receiving her note, she asks if Treckie told him about Ronald, the man who lives with her. She calls him "a bruiser type" and "disagreeable," a former ski instructor who now sells snowmobiles, and indicates that Treckie would be better off with Kenneth.

Tanya begins to remind him of Caroline Bunge, his uncle's unstable friend. "Both had a considerable experience of men. Together they had probably seen more nude males than the U.S. surgeon general." And he reflects on his ignorance of contemporary sexual mores.

I might have learned something from Gide, Proust and others whom as a Parisian adolescent I had read as a matter of course. But not even Proust had covered the ground as the ground now was: The sexual tastes of the aristocracy, the misbehavior and hanky-panky of the haute bourgeoisie, the animal embraces of the proletarians and the peasantry (see Zola's Germinal, and so forth), were not in the same class with the contemporary democratized-plus-Third-World erotic mixture. Millions of persons had been freed from labor, routine, vows, incest prohibitions, and the rest of that to invent freely, and all the ingenuity of mankind, or as M. Yermelov used to say, intellect without soul, was turned loose -- the will of the insane to suffer pouring into erotic channels. You could well believe that  divine master plan for the evolution of love had miscarried, that the angels in their innocence had got the signals mixed up and inculcated all the wrong impulses into mankind.

And now Tanya makes a startling proposition: He should sue for custody of his daughter, and to strengthen his case they should get married -- "for the purpose, and only for the purpose." She says, "this startles you," and he says, "You're right."

He tries to evade the issue, by suggesting that, according to what Fishl has recently told him, she shouldn't "depend on the effect of reason in a courtroom," and he rattles on with a differently populated version of what Fishl had told him about women looking for a variety of different things in men: "a Sugar Ray physique, Mastroianni charm, romantic courage like Malraux, scientific wizardry like Crick and Watson with the double helix, millions like Paul Getty, plus a Spinoza brain." She responds, correctly, "Kenneth, you're evading me." She admits that she's ten years old than he is (he estimates the figure to be more like twenty), and claims that she wouldn't expect anything of him: "If you held me in your arms in bed, I'd be happy."

When she proposes that they go to her room and spend a night together, "to see what it might be like," he makes as swift an exit as possible, reflecting that "it would be against my rule of truthfulness to conceal the fact that I am fond of preposterous people. And what stunning offers you can get from the insane!"

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."