34
PARTISAN REVIEW
a little less hair. I have, furthermore, distilled a set of odors to go with
your hair and your arm pits, and these, again, are distinctive; and I
have supplied your skin with textures, and have given you appropriate
sounds--laughter for love play, a sharp intaking of the breath for
passion, and a wildness of hissing and moaning devoid of all language.
This is that solemn nakedness to which we bring not only our passion,
but our capacity for a sensual revenge. But it is not brutal; it is tender.
And above all it is persistent in the face of a thousand complications
I can never make. out.
And then the pencil in your mouth, the tongue stuck at me, and
the conversation and your waiting for me and the walk and the invi–
tation to your house, the lunch, and your promise and the happiness
almost, almost reached, and the conviction established beyond over–
throwing! Was it from this that I was to expect denial?
We lean toward the imperfect-it was too good to be true. But
this
is
no explanation. It will satisfy only a shallow, a skeptical intel–
ligence. The perfect must be true! What else is perfection, and why
do we demand it? But however I explain it, I still do not understand.
I refuse to believe my own reasons.
What then? I love you enough to think evil of you. I am angry
enough to know that what I saw and believed, you, too, saw-but
did not believe. You acknowledged a conviction witqout sharing it.
And nothing human can be colder!
Look how similarities endanger us. You, with the pencil in your
mouth, knew me well enough, from your own traits, to destroy me.
I am of the same erotic type as you. I, too, must be fed. My whofe
life can be explained by hunger. You knew you would have to offer,
give, yield.
If
only you had not known!
If
only your perception had
been clouded with that animal stupidity for which we are, occasion–
ally, so grateful in women! Or, if only I had known better! I should
have known that a woman will make a concession on one point only
when she has prepared some reservation on another.
As
it was, you
managed to concede everything, yet withheld everything. The evil
in your flirtatiousness was that it went beyond flirtation; it offered
love, real love, in order to snatch it away. It was the old game played
to its fullest, criminal in its intelligence, the
absolute
cheat.
Well, it's over and done with. Of course, in outdoing me you
also had to deny yourself. But a woman will count her self-denial at
a small cost when the game is so large and she masters it. But it's over,
