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PARTISAN REVIEW
shamefaced, and then giggled. This vulgarity was more comforting to
her than any assurances of love.
If
the seduction (or whatever it was)
could be reduced to its lowest common denominator, could be seen in
farcical terms, she could accept and even, wryly, enjoy it. The world of
farce was a sort of moral underworld, a cheerful, well-lit hell where a
Fall was only a prat-fall after all.
Moreover, this talk had about it the atmosphere of the locker room
or the stag-line, an atmosphere more bracing, more astringent than the
air of Bohemia. The ten-dollar tips, the Bourbon for the conductor indi–
cated competence and connoisseurship, which, while not of the highest
order, did extend from food and drink and haberdashery all the way up
to women. That was what had been missing in the men she had known in
New York-the shrewd buyer's eye, the swift, brutal appraisal. That was
what you found in the country clubs and beach clubs and yacht clubs–
but you never found it in the cafe of the Brevoort. The men she had known
during these last four years had been, when you faced it, too easily
pleased: her success had been gratifying but hollow.
It
was not difficult,
after all, to be the prettiest girl at a party for the sharecroppers. At bot–
tom, she was contemptuous of the men who had believed her perfect, for
she knew that in a bathing suit at Southampton she would never have
passed muster, and though she had never submitted herself to this cruel
test, it lived in her mind as a threat to her. A copy of
Vogue
picked up
at the beauty parlor, a lunch at a restaurant that was beyond her means,
would suffice to remind her of her peril. And if she had felt safe with the
different men who had been in love with her it was because-she saw it
now-in one way or another they were all of them lame ducks. The hand–
some ones, like her fiance, were good-for-nothing, the reliable ones, like
her husband, were peculiar-looking, the well-to-do ones were short and
wore lifts in their shoes or fat with glasses, the clever ones were alcoholic
or slightly homosexual, the serious ones were Jews or foreigners or else
wore beards or black shirts or were desperately poor and had no table
manners. Somehow each of them was handicapped for American life and
therefore humble in love. And was she too disqualified, did she really
belong to this fraternity of cripples, or was she not a sound and normal
woman who had been spending her life in self-imposed exile, a princess
among the trolls?
She did not know. She would have found out soon enough had she
stayed on in Portland, but she had not risked it. She had gone away East
to college and never come back until now. And very early in her college
life she had got engaged to a painter, so that nothing that happened in
the way of cutting in at the dances at Yale and Princeton really "counted."
She had put herself out of the running and was patently not trying. Her
engagement had been a form of insurance, but the trouble was that it not
only insured her against failure but also against success. Should she have
been more courageous? She could not tell, even now. Perhaps she
was
a
princess because her father was a real gentleman who lunched at his club
