THE TEETH
This
time his moue of comic disdain permitted their laughter,
and assured, they reached toward him with a tentative and unaccus–
tomed tenderness. Even Bea, who had stood against him with an air
of baffled aggression, as if before a male she were cheated of her
proper role, wrinkled her boneless nose at
him
in a grimace that might
have meant welcome. "Sit down, Mr. Plotkin."
"Not Mr. Plotkin-Warren, please!" He sat down (as
if
waiting
this signal, the girls arranged themselves about
him)
in the single
large chair, and taking a huge ornamental flask from an inside pocket,
began to drink. "Scotch," he said after a long swig, perspiring freely.
"Would you care for some?"
'
"We have gin or rum," Hilda said, moving her chair closer to
Warren's, indicating to the others perhaps that she would now take
the lead. "We thought on such a day something cool-" Her "th's"
rang against her teeth with a shower of spit, giving her an aspect
of clumsy eagerness he found somehow touching.
"I dislike gin and rum, and especially-ice."
Though they could no longer be wary before the naked failure
of his face, they did not seem able in any essential way to begin.
"You don't like ice?" Bea asked.
"I don't like ice." He would give them no opening until their
meaning had grown for him clearer. He invited silence in the familiar
room whose books and pictures betrayed to his quick glance only the
cliches of choice; the prints of Rouault and Chagall, the volumes of
Kafka and Dostoevsky, the files of little reviews charted the intellec–
tual fashions of their world, not them. He felt ashamed before that
astonishing joy and despair become- a uniform.
But the anonymity of the room, its pat evasions of loneliness,
had been disrupted by his coming. It had now the raw, bruised look
of habitual untidiness too thoroughly and quickly ordered. He knew
he was inadequate to the apparent weight of his expected coming;
only some subtle and stupendous insult could right the balance--
"That flask looks like 1920," Hilda said, insisting on her nearness.
"Those were my happiest days; I w.as young then." His face
revealed that he could scarcely have been born then; this he knew–
and again silence.
All day they mu.st have cleaned and scurried, prepared. Even
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