Read Online Herzog by Saul Bellow - Free Book Online Page A

looking at her darkened, painted lids but into her eyes, bright and brown. Her nostrils tensed softly. She showed him her sympathetic face. "We still are friends," she said.
        "Well..." said Moses. "I'm fond of Herman. Of you."
        "I am your friend. And I'm a truthful person."
        He saw himself in the train window, hearing his own words clearly. "I think you're on the level."
        "You believe me, don't you?"
        "I want to, naturally."
        "You should. I've got your interests at heart, too. I keep an eye on little June."
        "I'm grateful for that."
        "But Madeleine is a good mother. And you don't have to worry. She doesn't run around with men. They phone her all the time, chasing after her. Well comshe is a beauty, and a very rare type, too, because she is so brilliant. Down there in Hyde Park-as soon as everybody knew about the divorce, you'd be surprised who all started to call her."
        "Good friends of mine, you mean."
        "If she was just a fly-by-night, she could have her choice of men. But you know how serious she is.
        Anyhow, people like Moses Herzog don't grow on bushes, either. With your brains and charm, you won't be easy to replace. Anyhow, she's always at home.
        She's rethinking everything-her whole life. And there is nobody else. You know you can believe me."
        Of course if you considered me dangerous it was your duty to lie.
        And I know I looked bad, my face swelled up, eyes red and wild.
        Female deceit, though, is a deep subject.
        Thrills of guile. Sexual complicity, conspiracy. Getting in on it. I watched you bully Herman to get a second car, and I know how you can bitch! You thought I might kill Mady and Valentine. But when I found out, why didn't I go to the pawnshop and buy a gun?
        Simpler yet, my father left a revolver in his desk. It's still there. But I'm no criminal, don't have it in me; frightful to myself, instead.
        Anyway, Zelda, I see you had tremendous pleasure, double excitement, lying from an overflowing heart, All at once the train left the platform and entered the tunnel. Temporarily in darkness, Herzog held his pen. Smoothly the trickling walls passed. In dusty niches bulbs burned. Without religion. Then came a long incline and the train rose from underground and rode in sudden light on the embankment above the slums, upper Park Avenue.
        In the east Nineties an open hydrant gushed and kids in clinging drawers leaped screaming. Now came Spanish Harlem, heavy, dark, and hot, and Queens far off to the right, a thick document of brick, veiled in atmospheric dirt.
        Herzog wrote, Will never understand what women want. What do they want? They eat green salad and drink human blood.
        Over Long Island Sound the air grew clearer.
        It gradually became very pure. The water was level and easy, soft blue, the grass brilliant, spattered with wildflowers-plenty of myrtle among these rocks, and wild strawberries blossoming.
        I now know the whole funny, nasty, perverted truth about Madeleine. Much to think about.
        He now had ended.
        But at the same high rate of speed, Herzog streaked off on another course, writing to an old friend in Chicago, Lucas Asphalter, a zoologist at the university.
        What's gotten into you? I often read "human-interest" paragraphs but I never expect them to be about my friends. You can imagine how it shook me to see your name in the Post.
        Have you gone crazy? I know you adored that monkey of yours, and I'm sorry he's dead. But you should have known better than to try to revive him by mouth-to-mouth respiration. Especially as Rocco died of TB and must have been jumping with bugs.
        Asphalter was queerly attached to his animals.
        Herzog suspected that he tended to humanize them.
        That macaque monkey of his, Rocco, was not an amusing creature, but obstinate and cranky, with a