THE TEETH
hot.
C.
Those girls must be, or they would not have asked him, fools.
·D.
He had forgotten his own Article. But now under his shame and
elation, he shuddered, trapped; he, for whom everything must be
said,
had come upon a story ("And in the end, the nickel lay
in
the
gutter and I could not have found it in the dark."), and he would
have to go up to the girls, waiting though not for this, and confess. He
hoped they would be, at least, amused.
Laying on hands, he cured his brief lameness, walked quickly to
the address he had jotted on a scrap of paper and oddly not lost.
Only the expected ignominy of submitting to the absurd myth of
himself that three strangers might hold, bore him up through the
ambush of heat (it had waited all day for his coming), the dense
expectancy of the dark passage of the stairs. Furtive lights emphasized
the dark at each of the four landings, and in their glimmer the
ruined pattern of the wall paper eluded him like the meaning of
his
venture.
What rank odor in the variety of that stagnant shaft reminded
him, he could not quite tell, but some smell brought back to him with
unforeseen vividness the beginning of his Article, the piece whose
uncertain thesis had prompted the awkward letter which had com–
pelled his coming:
The ultimate alienation: between the self and the face. From God
we
are cut off by an accident of existence: we are, He is not.
How he had pondered whether to. capitalize that pronoun, and hov·
few would relish his decision on the proper convolution.
Our neighbors elude us by discontinuity of substance. But our faces,
whose existence a toothache or tic confirms, continuous with our knowl–
edge of them, are utter strangers. Lies. The gross jowl, the split lip, the
mal-occluded teeth. ...
He touched the teeth in his pocket, and with the first premonitory
glimmer of the jest, memory of those words died from him.
It
did
not matter; the Article had seemed once a superior sort of a joke,
but it was hard now to recall his exact relation to the ideas. He re–
membered that he had got thirty-five dollars for it from the charming
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