NEW YEAR'S EVE
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belief that if he were an interesting and gifted author, everyone woulJ
like him and want to be with him and enjoy conversation with him.
He criticized the self-pity which wept in him, he criticized it
and repudiated it from the top of his mind, for all the good it did.
In other cages of the room, other human beings were trying
without success to get along with each other.
Nicholas O'Neil sat on the bathtub rim, his feet in a pail of hot
water, full of self-pity and self-absorption, wondering what disease
would take him to an early grave.
Arthur Harris remarked to Wilhelmina Gold that much might
be said of the truth of the remark that drinking was an inexpensive
form of mysticism. Wilhelmina replied that it was far from inex–
pensive. The party bored her because she did not like to drink.
Martha Landis looked across the living room at Delia Jones and
regarded her gown, which was intended to suggest to many minds
the delightful possibility of taking it off. Martha knew of the domestic
agreement of the Joneses, since Oliver was unable to hold his tongue
about matters interesting to him, and she saw both the intimacy and
the pathos of the gown. Delia, who was beginning her second drink,
was still unhappy and uneasy, for no one had spoken to her very
much, a silence which often occurred at parties. Because of her un–
easiness, Delia tried to down her drink quickly. She began to feel
miserable because she had not married the man who had courted
her for two years before she encountered Oliver. She had refused
him because, when they went out to dinner, he filled
his
pockets with
granulated sugar, a habit contracted during a poverty-beslummed
and unsweetened childhood. During the courtship he was earning a
great deal of money and there was no reason for any hoarding of
sugar: it was merely a tic which continued from childhood, and ab–
sentmindedly, yet compelled by the whole being. He had other such
habits, although they were less public. Thinking about these habits,
Delia felt that she had regarded them as being too important, for
she forgot, after these years, how expressive and significant they were.
And after all, why should anyone have to pay for another human
being's childhood? One has to pay for one's own, and one is in debt
as it is because of the continuous expense. The pain of these thoughts
was so keen that Delia went to get another drink, and drank it down
quickly in the hope of false serenity and false joy.
Delia was attractive and intelligent. She was unable to under–
stand why no amorous interludes occurred, for certainly Oliver was
not in the least at a loss, and she heard everywhere of extra-marital
