Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow

didn’t know what the hell was happening.”
      “So I was merely a contrast-gainer,” I said.
      “I thought contrast-gainer was just your term for married couples. You like a lady because she’s got a husband, a real stinker, who makes her look good.”
      “It’s one of those portmanteau expressions.”
      I am not a great poker-player. Besides, I was interested in the guests. One was a Lithuanian in the tuxedo-rental business, another a young Polish fellow getting computer training. There was a plainclothes detective from the homicide squad. Next to me sat a Sicilian-American undertaker, and last there were Rinaldo Cantabile and his cousin Emil. These two, said George, had crashed the party. Emil was a small-time hoodlum, born to twist arms and throw bricks through show windows. He must have taken part in the attack on my car. Rinaldo was extremely good-looking with a dark furry mustache as fine as mink, and he was elegantly dressed. He bluffed madly, spoke loudly, knocked the table with his knuckles, and pretended to be a cast-iron lowbrow. Still, he kept talking about Robert Ardrey, the territorial imperative, paleontology in the Olduvai Gorge, and the views of Konrad Lorenz. He said loudly and harshly that his educated wife left books around. The Ardrey book he had picked up in the toilet. God knows why we are drawn to others and become attached to them. Proust, an author to whom Humboldt introduced me and in whose work he gave me heavy instruction, said that he often was attracted to people whose faces had something in them of a hawthorn hedge in bloom. Hawthorn was not Rinaldo’s flower. White calla lily was more like it. His nose was particularly white and his large nostrils, correspondingly dark, reminded me of an oboe when they dilated. People so distinctly seen have power over me. But I don’t know which comes first, the attraction or the close observation. When I feel gross, dull, damaged in sensibility, a refined perception, coming suddenly, has great influence.
      We sat at a round pedestal table and as the clean cards flew and flickered George got the players to talk. He was the impresario and they obliged him. The homicide cop talked about killings in the street. “It’s all different, now they kill the sonofa-bitch if he doesn’t have a dollar in his pocket and they kill the sonofabitch if he gives them fifty dollars. I tell ‘em, ‘You bastards kill for money? For money? The cheapest thing in the world. I killed more guys than you but that was in the war.’ “
      The tuxedo man was in mourning for his lady friend, a telephone ad-taker at the Sun Times . He spoke with a baying Lithuanian accent, joking, bragging, but gloomy, too. As he got into his story he blazed with grief, he damn-near cried. On Mondays he collected his rented tuxedoes. After the weekend they were stained, he said, with sauce, with soup, with whisky or semen, “You name it.” Tuesdays he drove in his station wagon to a joint near the Loop where the suits were put to soak in vats of cleaning fluid. Then he spent the afternoon with a girl friend. Ah, they couldn’t even make it to the bed, they were so hot for each other. They fell to the floor. “She was a good family type of girl. She was my kind of people. But she’d do anything. I told her how, and she did it, and no questions.”
      “And you saw her on Tuesdays only, never took her to dinner, never visited her at home?” I said.
      “She went home at five o’clock to her old mother and cooked dinner. I swear I didn’t even know her last name. For twenty years I never had but her phone number.”
      “But you loved her. Why didn’t you marry her?”
      He seemed astonished, looking at the other players as if to say, What’s with this guy? Then he answered, “What, marry a hot broad who turns on in hotel rooms?”
      While everyone laughed the Sicilian undertaker explained to me in the special tone in which you tell the facts of life