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PARTISAN REVIEW
bitterly) for them to tackle. her like a football dummy; she remembered
the struggles back and forth on the slippery leather seats of sports road–
sters, the physical awkwardness of it all being somehow the crowning
indignity; she remembered also the rides home afterwards, and how the
boy's face would always be sullen and closed-he was thinking that he
had been cheated, made a fool of, and resolving never to ask her again,
so that she would finally become notorious for being taken out only once.
How indecent and anti-human it had been, like the tussle between the
drowning man and the lifeguard! And of course she had invited it, just
as she was inviting it now, but what she was really asking all along was
not that the male should assault her, but that he should believe her a
woman. This freedom of speech of hers was a kind of masquerade of
sexuality,' like the rubber breasts that homosexuals put on for drags, but,
like the dummy breasts, its brazenness betrayed it: it was a poor copy and
a hostile travesty all at once. But the men, she thought, did not look into
it so deeply; they could only respond by leaping at her-which, after
al~
she supposed, was their readiest method of showing her that her imper·
sonation had been convincing. Yet that response, when it came, never
failed to disconcert and frighten her: I had not counted on this, she
could always whisper to herself, with a certain sad bewilderment. For it
was all wrong, it was unnatural: art is to be admired, not acted on, and
the public does not belong on .the stage, nor the actors in the audience.)
But once more the man across the table _spared her. His face was a
little heavy with drink, but she could see no lechery in it, and he listened
to her as calmly as a priest. The sense of the nightmare lifted; free
will
was restored to her.
"You know what my favorite quotation is?" she asked suddenly. She
must be getting drunk, she knew, or she would not have said this, and a
certain cool part of her personality protested. I must not quote poetry,
she thought, I must stop it; God help us, if I'm not careful, we'll be sing–
ing Yale songs next. But her voice had broken away from her; she could
only follow it, satirically, from a great distance. "It's from Chaucer,"
she went on, when she saw that she had his attention. "Criseyde says it,
'I am myne owne woman, welle at aise.' "
The man had some difficulty in understanding the Middle English,
but when at last he had got it straight, he looked at her with bald
admiration.
"Golly," he said, "you are, at that!"
The train woke her the next morning as it jerked into Cheyenne. It
was still dark. The Pullman shade was drawn, and she imagined at first
that she was in her own lower berth. She knew that she had been drunk
the night before, but reflected with satisfaction that Nothing Had Hap–
pened. It would have been terrible if ... She moved slightly and touched
the man's body.
She did not scream, but only jerked away in a single spasmodic
