The Adventures of Augie March

It probably gave him some amusement, how I took to this sort of life.

There was a spell in which I mainly wished to own dinner clothes and be invited to formal parties and thought considerably about how to get into the Junior Chamber of Commerce. Not that I had any business ideas. I was better than fair in the shop, but I had no wider inventiveness about money. It was social enthusiasm that moved in me, smartness, clotheshorseyness. The way a pair of tight Argyle socks showed in the crossing of legs, a match o the bow tie settled on a Princeton collar, took me in the heart with enormous power and hunger. I was given over to it.

The Fenchels had checked out. There was a note at the desk for me from Thea. “Esther told uncle about you, and we are going to Waukesha for a few days and then East. You were foolish last night. Think about it. It’s true I love you. You’ll see me again.”

Then I had a few rough days and got stretched out in melancholy. I thought, where did I get that way, putting in for the best there was in the departments of beauty and joy as if I were a count of happy youth, and like born to elegance and sweet love, with bones made of candy? And had to remember what very seldom mattered with me, namely, where I came from, parentage,

That I didn’t want to be adopted never spontaneously occurred to her, and she assumed, as if it were normal but not to be mentioned, something else: that, like everyone, I was self-seeking. So that if I had any objections in reserve, they’d be minor ones, and I’d keep them covered. Or if I had thoughts of helping my brothers or Mama, those thoughts would be bound up and kept in the back. She had never seen Mama and didn’t intend to; and when I told her in St. Joe that Simon was coming she didn’t ask to meet him. There was a little in it of Moses and the Pharoah’s daughter; only I wasn’t a bulrush-hidden infant by any means. I had family enough to suit me and history to be loyal to, not as though I had been gotten off a stockpile.

However, […] there is a darkness. It is for everyone. You don’t, as perhaps some imagine, try it, one foot into it […] Nor are lowered into it with visitor’s curiosity, as the old Eastern monarch was let down into the weeds inside a glass ball to observe the fishes. Nor are lifted straight out after an unlucky tumble, like a Napoleon from the mud of the Arcole where he had been standing up to his thoughtful nose while the Hungarian bullets broke the clay off the bank. Only some Greeks and admirers of theirs, in their liquid noon, where the friendship of beauty to human things was perfect, thought they were clearly divided from this darkness. And these Greeks too were in it. But still they are the envy of the rest of the mud-springing, famine-knifed, street-pounding, war-rattled, difficult, painstaking, kicked in the belly, grief and cartilage mankind, the multitude […]

Here the door opened on what supported the weight of this heaped-up life. The room had been refurnished for him and Charlotte with silk-shaded reading lamps, bedside fleeces, drapes against the alley view and its barbarity—as in a palazzo against the smell of the canals—a satin cover on the bed, and auxiliary pillows on the roll of the bolster.

To save steps to the dresser Simon walked on the bed. He changed clothes, letting things lie where they were dropped or flung, kicking his shoes into the corner and drying the sweat from his naked body with an undershirt. There were days when he changed three times, or four, and others when he might sit listless and indifferent, and get up from his office chair heavy after hours of silence, saying, “Let’s get out of here.”

Instead of going home to change, sometimes he’d drive to the lake.