PARTISAN REVIEW
the positions. they had taken up must have been argued, arranged:
Bea and Rose on the studio couch facing him, Hilda next to him
on the chair that was too small for her, the place of honor. She was.
bent forward, elbows on her knees, and in the vee of her slack breasts
he could see a heavy fuzz of colorless hair; she must, in a gesture of
hopeless vanity, have peroxided it. Catching his eye, she blushed and
sat up, and he blushed with her (it was one of his few natural talents),
tapping casually his protruding teeth. Whatever gambit they had
prepared was lost in hesitation and visible sweat.
"Hasn't it been
hot!"
Rose whined, pushing at her limp hair,
and Bea nudged her with one buttock, glaring: to talk like some
debutante of the weather! There was a husband-wife ferocity in the
rebuke, and he knew then that they must be finding in each other
counterfeits of love. "Excuse me." Rose got up hastily, obviously in
need of a place to cry, "I'll get our drinks."
"Your article," Hilda plunged in desperately. "It was that–
but we already wrote- we see so few people really, but we
knew-"
He could no longer resist the appeal of her gracelessness; without
small talk, or manners (he knew their mean history; they had sat six
or seven at a time before the Dean of their Municipal Girls' College
to learn "poise," and scorning even the hope had grown hoarse and
emphatic on soapboxes for causes in which they no longer believed),
or charm, they could not compel love or remit boredom.
"No! No!" he said, "Not now. Let me tell you first what hap–
pened to me walking over from the bus. There was a paralytic, a
grotesque animal, a beggar-an affront (the word suggested itself
to him whenever he paused) to normality-" They listened, puzzled,
eager, ready if he gave them an opening, for gratitude. There was
a sense of having begun. Rose, her face clean and swollen, stood
in the doorway with a tray, not daring to set it down lest she interrupt
his flow of narrative; her trembling hand sloshed the rickeys over the
rims of the tall glasses.
"And when he began to limp, with an offensive hobble,
do~n
the street, I followed-imitating him." (He had not meant to lie;
deeper exigencies than truth compelled him.) "He hobbled, I hobbled.
He whined, I whined. He stopped, I stopped."
Rose was appealing over his shoulder for forgiveness, but Bea
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