The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [23]
CHAPTER XXIV
I see before me next a fellow named Mintouchian, who is an Armenian, of course. We are sitting together in a Turkish bath having a conversation, except that Mintouchian is doing most of the talking, explaining various facts of existence to me, by allegory mostly. The time is a week before Stella and I were married and I shipped out. This Mintouchian was a monument of a person, with his head very abrupt at the back, as Armenian heads tend sometimes to be, but lionlike in front, with red cheekbones. He had legs on him like that statue of Clemenceau on the Champs Elysees where Clemenceau is striding against a wind and is thinking of bread and war, and the misery and grandeur, going on with last strength in his longjohns and gaiters. Sitting together in this little white-tile room, Mintouchian and I' were quite pals in spite of differences of age and income--Mintouchian was supposed to be loaded. He looked overpowering, and he had tones in his voice like the dumping of coal. This must have done him good in court, as he was a lawyer. He was a friend of a friend of Stella whose name was Agnes Kuttner. Agnes lived in big style in an apartment off Fifth Avenue near one of the Latin-American embassies, furnished in Empire, with tremendous mirrors and chandeliers, Chinese screens, alabaster birds of night, thick drapes, and all luxuries like that. She went around to auction rooms and bought up treasures of the Romanoffs and Hapsburgs; she herself came from Vienna. Mintouchian had set up a trust fund for her, so she wasn't at all in the business of antiques, and her apartment was his home away from home, as hotels sometimes falsely speak of themselves. His other home was also in New York, but his wife was an invalid. Every evening he went and had dinner with her, served by her nurse in the bedroom. But before this he had visited Agnes. Usually his chauffeur was driving him across Central Park at 7:45 for the meal with his wife. The reason why I was with him in the bath this particular afternoon was that Stella had gone shopping with Agnes for the wedding. These two, Agnes and Mintouchian, 'were the only people, we ever saw when I got liberty from the base on weekends. He enjoyed taking us to Toots Shor's or the Diamond Horseshoe, I think, and other scarlet-and-gold-door places. The one time I tried to pick up the tab he pushed me away. I would have had to borrow from Stella to pay it. But Mintouchian was very openhanded, a grand good-time Charlie. Almost always in evening clothes of Rembrandt blackness, with his rededged eyes and craggy head and ears, and as if smelling the sands and savannahs with his flat nose, but a smile of spin-onthe-music, spend-the-money; his teeth were long, and he was ever so slightly felinewhiskered to go with his corrupt, intelligent wrinkles and expanding mouth. Amid the ladies he didn't let go with this smile, but now when he sat like a village headman of the south of Asia in his carnivalcolors towel, he did; and while conversing more man to man he was pinching himself under the eyes to make the bags disappear--his yellow toenails were lacquered with clear polish, except the small toes grievously buried in the lifeworn foot with its skinful of vessels. I wondered if he was really one of those hot-to-the-touch and perilous guys like Zaharoff or Juan March, or the Swedish Match King or Jake the Barber or Three-Finger Brown. Stella said he had money he hadn't even folded yet. He certainly was laying out plenty for Agnes, whom he had met in Cuba; he paid her husband a remittance to stay there. However, even though I found out that Mintouchian wasn't strictly honest, he was never a rogue's-gallery character. To get his legal education, as a matter of fact, he had played the organ in silent movies. But he was a crack lawyer now and had global business interests, and, moreover, he was a lettered person and reader. It was one of his curiosities to figure out historical happenings like the building of the Berlin-Baghdad Railway or the Battle of Tannenberg, and he furthermore knew a lot about the lives of Martyrs. He was another of those persons who persistently arise before me with life counsels and illumination throughout my entire earthly pilgrimage. I couldn't figure out what he saw in Agnes, who was obviously the boss over him. Her eyes were deep brown, of an aristocratic favorite of cafes and carriages of Imperial days, although she must have been only a child in those times. And what's more, she had a slight depression on either side of her turned-up nose which made her look not exactly of an open nature. Nevertheless she was Stella's friend, and Mintouchian loved her. This made me think of the deep wishes of elderly people, or desires unslayable short of total demolition by death. "Death!" Mintouchian said it himself. He was describing how he was subject to strokes. He said, "I don't want to make you gloomy, so close to your wedding." "Oh no, sir, you couldn't make me gloomy. I love Stella too much to consider it." "Well, I won't say that I was as happy as you, but I was also very feeling when I got married. Maybe it came from playing the mood music, which I was then doing. For sea adventures I'd play 'Fingal's Cave.' For Rudolph Valentine, 'Orientale,' Cesar Cui, Tchaikovsky's 'Sehnsucht.' Also 'Poet and Peasant.' You try to fight this stuff, when Milton Sills sees Conway Tearle didn't go down on the Titanic, or something. I was playing it all from my book on torts, boning up for the bar exam. But all the same, those were times of emotion. Or maybe you think this is guff?" "No, why?" "You think I'm a bandit, only you wouldn't say it on a bet. You fight your malice too much." "Everybody says so. It's as if you were supposed to have low opinions. I'd never say I was angelic, but I respect as much as I can." Mintouchian said, "In-one day of practice I see more than you could imagine if it was a project. The Balzac Comedie Humaine is child's play in comparison. I wake up in the morning and have to ask myself, 'Now in the case of Shimi versus Shimi, who is screwing who? Who is going to be in worse shape in the end? The man who takes the child away from the living-in-sin mother? The lover who makes her give up the kid to avoid the publicity so it won't harm his business? The mother who does anything for the lover?' Ribono shel Olam!" I was surprised by this phrase, which he explained as follows: "My father was janitor of a synagogue, and I hung around the cellar. I had an uncle who was a colonel in the Boer War. Who is what? So if history casts a strange or even ridiculous light on us, we are still all serious, aren't we? We die anyway." He went back to the subject of his strokes. "Here several years ago I was sitting on the toilet figuring a big deal mentally when suddenly the Angel of Death plucked me by the nose. My mind turned black. I fell on my face. I think if my belly hadn't been in the way to break the force I might have been killed. As it was, the blood from my nose sprayed the door like seltzer. Which, in my vanity, I had shut. Then by and by the spark of life came back to me. My mind filled again with the typical thought and light of Mintouchian. Now, I reflected, you're Mintouchian again. As if I had an option. Do I have to come back Mintouchian, including the distressing parts? Yes, because to live is to be Mintouchian, my dear man. I went over all my secrets and found they were still in place. I still didn't know who was screwing whom, and 1 crept into my bed and shivered from the touch of death. "But I was saying"--he gave me a genial smile with heart-felt squint and then he yawned and enjoyed the golden light--"how a guy struggles with malice. How life goes beyond the conscience of nice wellreared people. A good upbringing stops them from knowing what they think even. Because we all think the same, more or less. You love Stella --all right, don't you?" "Like I never loved anyone before." "That's swell. That's what I call answering like a man. When is your birthday?" "In January." "I'd have sworn to it. So is mine. I believe the highest types are born in January. It's barometric--you can look it up in Ellsworth Huntington. The parents make love in spring when the organism is healthiest and then the best specimens are conceived. If you want children you should plan to knock up your dear one in that season. Ancient wisdom is right. Now science comes lately and finds it out. But what I wanted to say about your bride, even she, is that she's no different from the rest of us except more gifted and beautiful. It is absolutely certain that she has thought of the future both with and without you.