Tennessee Williams
RUBIO Y MORENA
The writer Kamrowski had many acquaintances, especially
now that his name had begun to acquire some public luster, and
he also had a few friends which he had kept over the years the way
that you keep a few books you have read several times but are still
not willing to part with. He was essentially a lonely man, not sell–
sufficient but living as though he were. He had never been able to
believe that anybody sincerely cared much about him and perhaps
no one did. When women treated him tenderly, which · sometimes
happened
in
spite of his reserve, he suspected them of trying to pull
the wool over
his
eyes. He was not at ease with them. It even em–
barrassed him to sit across from a woman at a restaurant table. He
could not return her look across the table nor keep his mind on the
bright things she was saying.
If
she happened to wear an' ornament
at her throat or on the lapel of her jacket he would keep his eyes on
this pin and stare at it so intently that finally she would interrupt
her talk to ask him why he found it so fascinating or might even
unfasten it from her dress and hand it across the table for closer in–
spection. When going to bed with a woman, desire would often desert
his body as soon as he put off his clothes and exposed his nakedness
to her. He felt her eyes on him, watching, knowing, involving, and
the desire ran out of him like water, leaving him motionless as a
dead body on the bed beside her, impervious to her caresses and
burning with shame, repulsing her almost roughly if she persisted
in trying to waken his passion. But when she had given up trying,
when she had finally turned away from his unresponsive body and
fallen asleep, then he would turn slowly warm with desire, not shame,
and begin to approach the woman until with a moan of longing,
greater than even his fear of her had been, he would rouse her from
sleep with the brutal haste of a bull in loveless coupling. It was not
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