376
PARTISAN REVIEW
heel should grind it into the mud-colored carpet, in the spectacle of
the fat roach moving across the cracked linoleum of the bathroom
floor while he steamed in the tub. Once he had brought .is mother
to the apartment for tea, and she had sat on the edge of the over–
stuffed chair, holding a cracked cup and talking with a brittle and
calculated charm out of a face which was obviously being held in shape
by a profound exercise of will. She saw a roach venture out from the
kitchen door. She saw one of Jack Burden's friends crush an ant on
the inner lip of the sugar bowl and flick the carcass from
his
finger.
The nail of the finger itself was not very clean. But she kept right on
delivering the chaqn, out of the rigid face. He had to say that for her.
But afterwards, as they walked down the street, she had said:
"Why do you live like that?"
"It's what I'm built for, I reckon," Jack Burden said.
"With those people," she said.
"They're all right," he said, and wondered if they were, and
wondered if he was.
His mother didn't say anything for a minute, making a sharp,
bright clicking on the pavement with her heels as she walked along,
holding her small shoulders trimly back, carrying her famished–
cheeked, blue-eyed, absolutely innocent face slightly lifted to the puls–
ing sunset world of April like a very expensive present the world ought
to be glad even to have a look at. And back then, fifteen years ago,
it was still something to look at, too. Sometimes Jack Burden (who
was
Me
or what
Me
was fifteen years ago) would be proud to go into
a place with her, and have people stare the way they would, and just
for a minute he would be happy. But there is a lot more to everything
than just walking into a hotel lobby or restaurant.
Walking along beside him, she said meditatively: "That dark–
haired one-if he'd get cleaned up-he wouldn't be bad looking."
"That's what a lot of other women think," Jack Burden said,
and suddenly felt a nauseated hatred of the dark-haired one, the one
who had killed the ant on the sugar bowl, who had the dirty nails. But
he had to go on, something in him made him go on: "Yes, and a lot
of them don't even care about cleaning him up. They'll take him
like he
is.
He's the great lover of the apartment. He put the sag in the
springs of that divan we got."
"Don't be vulgar," she said, because she definitely did not like
what is known as vulgarity in conversation.
"It's the truth," he said.
She didn't answer, and her heels did the bright clicking. Then
