big but without heaviness. Not a bulky figure. He had style. You could, if you liked, call him an old bohemian, but such classifications did not take you far. No category could hold Victor.
The traveling-celebrity bit was very tiring. You flew in and you were met at the airport by people you didn’t know and who put you under a strain because they wanted to be memorable individually, catch your attention, ingratiate themselves, provoke, flatter—it all came to the same thing. Driving from the airport, you were locked in a car with them for nearly an hour. Then there were drinks—a cocktail hubbub. After four or five martinis you went in to dinner and were seated between two women, not always attractive. You had to remember their names, make conversation, give them equal time. You might as well be running for office, you had to shake so many hands. You ate your prime rib and drank wine, and before you had unfolded your speech on the lectern, you were already tuckered out. You shouldn’t fight all this, said Victor; to fight it only tired you more. But normally Victor thrived on noise, drink, and the conversation of strangers. He had so much to say that he overwhelmed everybody who approached him. In the full blast of a cocktail party he was able to hear everything and to make himself heard; his tenor voice was positively fifelike when he made an important point, and he was superarticulate.
If after his lecture a good discussion developed, he’d be up half the night drinking and talking. That was what he loved, and to be abed before midnight was a defeat. So he was either uncharacteristically fatigued or the evening had been a drag. Stupid things must have been said to him. And here he was, a man who had associated with Andre Breton, Duchamp, the stars of his generation, weary to the bone, in frozen Buffalo (you could picture Niagara Falls more than half iced over), checking in with a girlfriend in Evanston, Illinois. Add to the list of bad circumstances his detestation of empty hours in hotel rooms. Add also that he had probably taken off his pants, as she had seen him do in this mood, and thrown them at the wall, plus his big shoes, and his shirt made into a ball. He had his dudgeons, especially when there hadn’t been a single sign of intelligence or entertainment. Now for comfort (or was it out of irritation) he telephoned Katrina. Most likely he had had a couple of drinks, lying naked, passing his hand over the hair of his chest, which sometimes seemed to soothe him. Except for his socks, he would then resemble the old men that Picasso had put into his late erotic engravings. Victor himself had written about the painter-and-model series done at Mougins in 1968, ferocious scribbles of satyr artists and wide-open odalisques. Through peepholes aged wrinkled kings spied on gigantic copulations. (Victor was by turns the painter-partner and the aged king.) Katrina’s pretty lopsidedness might have suited Picasso’s taste. (Victor, by the way, was no great admirer of Picasso.)
“So Buffalo wasn’t a success?”
“Buffalo! Hell, I can’t see any reason why it exists.”
“But you said you had to stop to see Vanessa.”
“That’s another ordeal I can do without. We’re having breakfast at seven.”
“And your lecture?”
“I read them my paper on Marx’s
“Well, tomorrow will be more important, more interesting,” said Katrina.
Victor had been invited to address the Executives Association, an organization of bankers, economists, former presidential advisers, National Security Council types. Victor assured her that this was a far more important outfit than the overpublicized Trilateral Commission, which, he said, was a front organization using ex-presidents and other exploded stars to divert attention from real operations. The guys who were bringing him to Chicago wanted him to talk about “Culture and Politics, East and West.” Much they cared about art and culture, said Victor. But they sensed that it had to be dealt with; challenging powers were ascribed to it, nothing immediate or worrisome, but one ought to know what intellectuals were up to. “They’ve listened to professors and other pseudoexperts,” said Victor, “and maybe they believe they should send for an old Jewish character. Pay him his price and he’ll tell you without fakery what it’s all about.” The power of big-shot executives wouldn’t overawe him. Those people, he said, were made of Styrofoam. He was gratified nevertheless. They had asked for the best, and that was himself—a realistic judgment, and virtually free from vanity. Katrina estimated that he would pick up a ten-thousand-dollar fee. “I don’t expect the kind of dough that Kissinger gets, or Haig, although I’ll give better value,” he told her. He didn’t mention a figure, though. Dotey, no bad observer, said that he’d talk freely about anything in the world but money—
Dotey’s observations, however, were commonplace. She spoke with what Katrina had learned to call
“By the way, Victor,” said Katrina. “Do you remember the notes you dictated over the phone for use, maybe, tomorrow? I typed them up for you. If you need them, I’ll have them with me when I meet you at O’Hare in the morning.”
“I’ve had a different thought,” said Victor. “How would it be if you were to fly here?”
“Me? Fly to Buffalo?”
‘That’s right. You join me, and we’ll go on to Chicago together.”
Immediately all of Katrina’s warmest expectations were reversed, and up from the bottom there seeped instead every kind of dreariness imaginable. While Victor was in the air in the morning, she wouldn’t be preparing, treating herself to a long bath, then putting on her pine-green knitted Vivanti suit and applying the Cabochard, his favorite perfume. She would be up until two A. M., improvising, trying to make arrangements, canceling her appointment downtown, setting her clock for five A. M. She hated to get up while it was still night.
There must be a sensible explanation for this, but Katrina couldn’t bring herself to ask what it was—like “What’s wrong? Are you sick?” She had unbearable questions to put to herself, too: Will I have to take him to the hospital?… Why me? His daughter is there. Does he need emergency surgery? Back to all the horrible stuff that had happened at Mass. General? A love that began with passionate embraces ending with barium X rays, heavy drugs, bad smells? The grim wife coming back to take control?
Don’t go so fast, Katrina checked herself. She regrouped and reentered her feelings at a different place. He was completely by himself and was afraid that he might start to crumble in his plane seat: a man like Victor, who was as close to being a prince as you could be (in what he described as “this bungled age”), such a man having to telephone a girl—and to Victor, when you came right down to it, she was
What was necessary now was to speak as usual, so that when he said, “I had the travel desk make a reservation for you, if you want to use it—are you there?” she answered, “Let me find a pen that writes.” A perfectly good pen hung on a string. What she needed was to collect herself while she thought of an alternative. She wasn’t clever enough to come up with anything, so she began to print out the numbers he gave her. Heavyhearted? Of course she was. She was forced to consider her position from a “worst case” point of view. A North Shore mother of two, in a bad, a deteriorating marriage, had begun to be available sexually to visitors. Selectively. It was true that a couple of wild mistakes had occurred. But then a godsend, Victor, turned up.
In long discussions with her analyst (whom she no longer needed), she had learned how central her father was in all this, in the formation or deformation of her character. Until she was ten years old she had known nothing but kindness from her daddy. Then, with the first hints of puberty, her troubles began. Exasperated with her, he said she was putting on a guinea-pig look. He called her a con artist. She was doing the farmer’s-daughter- traveling-salesman bit. “That puzzled expression, as if you can’t remember whether a dozen is eleven or thirteen. And what do you suppose happens with the thirteenth egg, hey? Pretty soon you’ll let a stranger lead you into the broom closet and take off your panties.” Well! Thank you, Daddy, for all the suggestions you planted in a child’s mind. Predictably she began to be sly and steal pleasure, and she did play the farmer’s daughter, adapting and modifying until she became the mature Katrina. In the end (a blessed miracle) it worked out for the best, for the result was just what had attracted Victor—an avant-garde personality who happened to be crazy about just this erotic mixture. Petty bourgeois sexuality, and retrograde petty bourgeois at that, happened to turn Victor on. So
