PARTISAN
REVIEW
"Love!" she said more distinctly, "Love!" She bent farther for–
ward, her head down, until he could see once more the fur between
her breasts, dewed now with sweat, heaving with her audible breath.
He felt bludgeoned by her clumsy tenderness. She made no
gesture (she knew none) of approach, but the baffled innocent hunger
of her eyes oppressed him. She demanded modestly the merest token
of regard, but in return unleashed the great shapeless assault of, she
had named it rashly, her love.
Better, he thought, for her to have endured the meager lustless
embraces of Bea and Rose (she looked up at them now in muted
triumph, as if to say: You see, there is also
this)
than to have exposed
herself to the certainty of his insult. He grew furious with her for
shaming them both, for the openness that compelled his revulsion, for
the foreseeable end of their encounter.
Trembling, he wiped his brow, neck, the backs of his hands with
his second handkerchief and flung it through the open window beside
which he had been sitting. Hilda arose and looked down the dark
shaft into which his handkerchief had fallen. From there sparse music
came suddenly into the room, mid-phrase, as someone below turned
on a radio.
"Heat!" he cried in disgust. "Everything else is a lie."
Rose looked up at the word, turning vaguely from him to Bea,
to see if
his
cry had redeemed her earlier remark. She fumbled once
more at her lank hair.
"I must go," he said unexpectedly, tapping his watch. "It's nearly
nine."
"But that's early!" Hilda cried.
"Another appointment-"
"The refreshments-all those-we worked so-" Rose whined.
"Oh
sh!
You fool!" Hilda hissed, and to Warren, "But we
haven't-"
"We never shall," he answered. "Another appointment, another
face." And with no sense of willing it, he turned from them, plucked
at his mouth and wheeled back toward their surprise his face without
the expected teeth, scarcely known.
In the few seconds that remained and after the grotesque hy–
perbole of
his
disguise, they must have believed him really hand-
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