PARTISAN REVIEW
other people had noticed it for him. Sometimes when they stopped
at a filling-station or entered a restaurant at night, he would notice
the way strangers looked at her with a sort of amused surprise, and
then he would look at her too, and he, too, would be amused and
surprised at the strangeness of her appearance. She was tall and
narrow-shouldered and most of the flesh of her body had centered
about the hips which were as large as the rump of a liorse. Her hands
were large as a man's but not capable. Their movements were too
nervous and her feet clopped awkwardly around. She was forever
stumbling or getting caught on something because of her ungainly
size and motions. Once the sleeve of her jacket got caught in the
slammed car door and instead of quietly opening the door and dis–
engaging the caught sleeve she began to utter short, whimpering cries
and to tug at the caught sleeve till the material gave way and a piece
of sleeve tore loose. Afterwards he noticed that her whole body was
shaking as if she had just passed through some nervous ordeal and
throughout their supper at the hotel cafe she would keep lifting up
the torn sleeve and frowning at it with a mystified expression as
if she did not understand how it got that way: then glancing at
him with her head slightly tilted in a look of inquiry as
if
to ask
him if he understood what had happened to the torn sleeve. After
the supper, when they had gone upstairs she took out a pair of scissors
and cut the sleeve neatly across to give it an edge. He pointed out
to her that this made a disparity between the lengths of the two
sleeves. Ha ha, said the girl. She held the jacket up to the light.
She saw the disparity herself and began to laugh at it. Finally she
threw the jacket into the waste-paper basket and she lay down on
the bed with a copy of a movie-magazine. She thumbed through
it rapidly till she came to a picture of a young male star on a beach.
She stopped at that page. She drew the magazine close to her eyes
and stared at it with her large mouth hanging open for half an hour
while Kamrowski lay on the bed beside her, only comfortably, warmly
half-conscious of her until before sleep, as peacefully as he would
sleep, he turned to embrace her.
Kamrowski had grown to love her. Unfortunately he was even
less articulate in speaking about such things than he would have
been in trying to write about them. He could not make the girl
understand the tenderness he felt toward her. He was not a man who
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