PARTISAN REVIEW
That winter Kamrowski began to form other attachments of
more than a night's duration, one in particular with a young woman
who was
also
a writer and a member of the urban intelligentsia. She
had, alas, one defect. She wore contact lenses which she used to
remove before going to bed and Kamrowski had to ask her not to
put them on the table beside the bed but in the little drawer of the
table. But this was an unimportant item in the affair which went
along smoothly. He began to make love to this girl, Ida, more reg–
ularly than he made love to Amada. Now when Amada would turn
to him on the bed, he would often avert himself from her and
pretend to be sleeping. He would hear her beginning to cry beside
him. Her hand would move enquiringly down
his
body, and once
he seized her hand and slammed it roughly away from him. Then
she got out of bed. He got up, too, and went into the kitchen and
sat there with a pitcher of ice-water. He heard her packing her things
as she had done often before. Her trunk was a military locker. The
bottom of
it
was filled with random keepsakes such as restaurant
menus, pictures of actors torn from movie magazines, post-cards
from all the places they had visited in their travels. Sometimes while
she was packing she would stalk into the kitchen, holding up some
article such as a towel that she had filched from a hotel bathroom.
Is this yours or mine? she would ask. He would shrug. She would
make a terrible face at him and return to the bedroom to continue
her packing. He knew that she would unpack everything in the morn–
ing. In the morning she would restore the souvenir menus and post–
cards to their places about the mirror and the mantel because without
him there was no place for her to go and no one to go with. HI'; did
not want to feel too sorry for her. He was enjoying himself too
m~ch
to allow a shadow of contrition to weigh upon him too heavily,
~.r:td
so he would think to himself, for self-exoneration during such scenes.
She was only a whore in a third-class hotel where I found her. Why
isn't she happy? Well, I don't give a damn!
And yet he w.as very glad, when he had finished drinking the
pitcher of ice-water, to find that she was no longer packing but had
gone back to bed. Then he would make love to her more tenderly
than he had for many weeks past.
It was a morning after an incident such as this that Kamrowski
first discovered that the girl had begun to steal from him. Thereafter
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