9. More Die of Heartbreak, by Saul Bellow, pp. 250-327

From "In the night there came an extraordinary phone call ..." to end.

_____

Benn telephones Kenneth at 2:10 a.m. from a phone booth in the laundry room of the Layamons' apartment building. He is in the throes of a panic attack and doesn't want any of them to overhear their conversation. Matilda is insisting that he get Vilitzer to give him the money. Kenneth points out to him that having the money would only give the Layamons more power over him. But Benn is in such a nervous state that he can't focus on any one thing, and now he has a new complaint about his wife, in addition to her shoulders: "Matilda's breasts are so far apart!" Kenneth calls him a "negative fetishist" who fell "out of love with Matilda's shoulders" and this latest discovery is only further evidence of "fragmentation or disintegration." Benn moans, "Why should I fight Uncle to obtain millions for a woman whose breasts are so far apart? It's getting beyond me." But Kenneth finally gets his uncle to calm down and get some rest before they meet for the parole hearing.

The next morning, Benn shows Kenneth the Charles Addams cartoon that had been referred to on the first page of the novel: Gomez and Morticia are holding hands. and the caption reads

"Are you unhappy, darling?"
"Oh yes, yes! Completely."

It has a special significance for Benn. He tells Kenneth that Matilda had suggested that she go to the hearing with him instead of Kenneth, and he turned her down. "He wanted me to see how resolute he had been with her. All I could see was how shook up he was.... If he faltered or stammered, shrewd old Vilitzer would conclude that he was a sexually failed husband with a wife who had the whip hand, sending him on errands. With sex troubles, men always faulted the husband."

In the hearing room they take their places behind Vilitzer, who has adopted the pseudo-Roman hairstyle worn by Derek Jacobi in I, Claudius: "It seems popular with the senior Mafiosi, whom you often see with a small, slightly curled fringe." The hearing is conducted by the governor, "a loosely massive man. In his slackness there were highly organized tensions, and I would have said that he was a dangerous person, a mean fighter." The testimony, sexually explicit but clinical, dealing with evidence concerning the woman's rape, unsettles Benn: "'Do we have to go step by step through all this?' said Uncle, a little distracted. He made me feel like a Mephistopheles who had forced him out of his study and made him face life.... The hearing at such a time of crisis was hell on him. He couldn't approach Uncle Vilitzer without first passing through these sexual agonies."

But approach him he does, after the hearing recesses. Vilitzer agrees to give them fifteen minutes of his time. He tells them that Fishl had spoken to him, and accuses Benn of having been sent by his "new father-in-law and Judge Chetnik, his buddy." He claims that Benn and his sister "realized three hundred thousand dollars" from their parents' "three hundred bucks" investment in the property where the Electronic Tower now stands, and should be happy for that. To Kenneth's surprise, Benn stands up to Vilitzer.

Considering what a state Benn was in, what with the somatic peculiarities of the Layamon build, the triple resemblance of Matilda, Dr. Layamon and Tony Perkins as the killer granny, plus the new complaint that his bride's breasts were so widely separated, with God knows what further forms of nuttiness marking time in his head, I wouldn't have predicted such quiet stability in the face of Vilitzer's rage. 

But in the end, Vilitzer won't agree to pay Benn anything. "You're not the boss over yourself. They're using you to beat up on me. As far as I'm concerned there's nothing to settle." And finally, Vilitzer tries to hit Benn. Kenneth intervenes and restrains him, though "he felt as light as an empty plastic egg carton." Just then Fishl enters. Vilitzer "swept -- tottered -- out and we stood silent."

When Vilitzer has left, Fishl says they should have waited and given him time to prepare his father for the meeting. "And I'll tell you, Cousin Benno, I'd think better of you if you had gone after him on your own initiative, not on instructions from outside parties." When Fishl leaves, Benn tells Kenneth that the matter is now between Matilda and himself, and when Kenneth asks if "Matilda will be able to accept an alternative -- give up her plans for the Roanoke," Benn replies, "You seem to have decided in advance that Matilda is an unyielding person."

Later, Benn calls Kenneth several times to tell him about his lunch with Matilda, but Kenneth finds his conversation confused and unfocused. "The downtown hearing was like the strip show in Kyoto in its effect. Hard-edged sex, one might call it, abstract excitement, maddening literalness when the girls invited the public to stare at their inmost secrets." Kenneth learns more from a later conversation with Matilda in which she told him that, knowing how upset he would be at facing Vilitzer, she had made herself sexually alluring to Benn: "I ... put up my hair the way he liked it. He thought a woman should show her neck and didn't care for the hair to be down, schoolgirl fashion, what he called the Alice in Wonderland effect. Your uncle could make very special demands. Everything had to be 'just so.' In sexual relations also." She goes on to tell Kenneth that his uncle liked for her "to put on a frilled blouse when they made love. Also that he had a decided preference for the foot of the bed and for one corner of the mattress." Kenneth says that what he really wanted to know "was how seriously she took Uncle." The rest was too much information.

Matilda wanted to be a tough broad in the brokerage world but also comfortably married to a respected professor, living in style at the Roanoke, where (a lady with fluent, current French) she could have something approaching a salon even in a vulgar town like this. Lastly, she had made a cult of deep sleep, and for that the Roanoke was the perfect setting.

Then the problems with Treckie resurface. Tanya Sterling calls to tell Kenneth that her private investigator has found that Treckie is marrying the snowmobile man, but during the off-season in that business they planned to "operate from a base on Puget Sound and make the flea market circuit in a van or trailer or camper. Little Nancie would travel with them, naturally, although I was to be offered an option of taking her to live with me summers, when Treckie would be busiest." Naturally, Tanya once again insists that she and Kenneth should marry and sue for full custody.

Among numerous calls from Benn to inform him that Matilda is unyielding in her insistence on living in the Roanoke and the consequent necessity of trying to come to terms with Vilitzer, Kenneth also hears from Fishl, who is getting ready to fly to Miami Beach, concerned about the state of his father's health. And that night, about 3 a.m., Benn calls to tell him that he has also heard from Fishl, who "rang me to say he didn't know how long Uncle Harold would last. He's on standby out at the airport -- can't afford full fare to Florida. Frantic! As if it were all my fault." And after the call, Benn tells him, he couldn't sleep and began wandering around the Layamons' apartment. "When it's as bad as that, I've often gotten reinforced by that azalea in Jo Layamon's office." This time, he says, he "really had to have plant contact," so he broke the house rule about going into Mrs. Layamon's sanctum, where he discovered that the plant that had given him so much solace was

"a phony.... Made of silk. Probably in Taiwan or Hong Kong. Damn near perfect imitation. False, though. A stooge azalea -- a stand-in, a ringer, an impostor, a dummy, a shill! I was drawing support for weeks and weeks from this manufactured product. Every time I needed a fix, a contact, a flow, I turned to it. Me, Kenneth! After all these years of unbroken rapport, to be taken in.... The one thing I could always count on. My occupation, my instinct, my connection ... broken off....

"You don't grasp the meaning of a thing like this. I've lost it. Week after week of imaginary contact!"

The peculiar treasure lost! It wasn't that I didn't grasp what he was telling me. I grasped it only too well. 

So he tells Kenneth that he's decided to go to Florida. He and Matilda were scheduled to fly to Brazil via Miami, and they can meet at the airport. He had called to check on Vilitzer and learned that he had collapsed. Kenneth agrees to go with him to the airport. Benn also asks Kenneth to move into his apartment -- rent free. "The bank has standing instructions to pay the rent. I kept Lena's account in her own name."

In this connection, I couldn't help thinking of Aunt Lena ... who had introduced me to the valuable idea that modes of seeing were matters of destiny, that what is sent forth by the seer affects what is seen. She like to give the example of Whistler the painter when he was taken to task by a woman who said, "I never see trees like that." He told her, "No, ma'am, but don't you wish you could?" 

At the airport, Kenneth bids his uncle goodbye and then takes a flight to Seattle. He gears himself up for a fight with Ronald, Treckie's boyfriend, and when he reaches their apartment he barges past her in search of him. She tells Kenneth that Ronald has gone to Mass, and he goes into a rage in which he trashes the bathroom. After he calms down, they talk, and Treckie confirms what Tanya learned from the private investigator. He asks how Nancy is going to fit into this way of life, and she says, "Kids like movement, and there's a lot to learn around flea markets. They attract scads of characters. Haggling is good training." But when he tells her that he's moving out of the dormitory into Benn's apartment and responds to her observation that he'd "need some help with a woman" by saying, "I have somebody in mind," she comes around to the idea that Nancy could stay with him "on a trial basis." (He thinks, "Dita had enough of the romantic womanly about her to develop some kindness even towards Treckie's daughter.") As for the bathroom, Treckie says, "That's all right. As I figure, you had one tantrum coming to you."

 On the telephone, Benn tells him that Vilitzer is dead. He has also realized that "when you go against your deeper instinct you set off a train of cause and effect spreading in all directions. I drew on that damned azalea for weeks and got an illusion of feedback from it. Now everything has been adversely affected, so that I can't even believe myself when I say I did nothing to shorten Vilitzer's life." He promises to call Kenneth tomorrow afternoon, and in the meantime if Matilda calls him, not to tell her anything about Vilitzer: The family has covered up the death "for some complicated business tactical reason."

The call from Benn is late in coming the next day, and Kenneth has begun to believe that Benn has left for Brazil with Matilda without calling him. But Benn explains that he has told Matilda that Vilitzer is still alive and that he feels obligated to stay on in Miami: "I couldn't go away while my mother's brother was dying." So Matilda has left without him.

"By the time she's landing in Brazil I should be well on my way to the North Pole. You see, they've assembled an international team of scientists for the purpose of special researches. And I signed on three days ago, to check out lichens from both poles, a comparative study, and work out certain morphological puzzles.... We're going to be based in northern Scandinavia, at the edge of Finland, actually. And beyond.... nothing but night and ice will help me now. Night so that I can't see myself. Ice as a corrective. Ice for the rigor."

He has left his address in a drawer in his desk. Kenneth promises not to give it to Matilda.

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!"