PARTISAN REVIEW
I could hear a woman's voice beside him, though I could see
nothing of her around his hugeness but a hand advocating patience
in an occasional gesture. I felt it, though I do not customarily make
such responses, as a charming hand. From time to time that immense
head would tum toward me, with a pitiful attempt at stealth, in
baffled recognition, but his wife's hand touching
him
gently would
recall him to attention.
I found myself awaiting the turning of his head with an odd
mingling of dread and expectancy; he had a strange, an utterly
unforeseeable face, that contradicted, in what I could not help
feeling was a tragic way, his body.
It
was not simply that it was a
sad face, and yet somehow clearly intended for joy, but that it was
irredeemably unaware of its sadness, incapable of knowing it; its
sorrow was physical only, a sorrow of the muscles, of bone. It never
occurred to me that I knew him.
Even at that point, I think, nothing need have happened, had
I not (it seemed harmless enough and I could not, in any case, have
helped it) fallen asleep. I am not, looking back, ashamed of it; there
was no discourtesy, for with the light against the heavy lenses of
my glasses I ran little risk of being noticed, and I do not, of course,
snore. It seemed the proper response to the scarcely audible, lisping
presentation of the speaker. I could make out only the most familiar
words: "idea," "matter," "justice," but the speaker'S haughty finical
face swened in the haze of tobacco smoke, agitated by some unsus–
pected ventilation, his exaggerated motions of emphasis beginning
from the hip, his tweed jacket, too elegant for our grimy streets grew
larger- larger- then-
"Congratulations! I couldn't have done better myself!" The
bulky man beside me was thumping me awake with a beefy palm,
whooping meanwhile most vulgarly with what he apparently took
for good humor.
"I must have been asleep." It was, I fear, an absurd remark,
but I was scarcely awake and the crowd that had risen, unwilling
quite yet to depart, threatened to turn its idle malice upon us. We
were a curious pair, and someone already had begun to laugh.
"You can say that again, my friend," he bellowed, and, quite
abruptly, "I know you!"
I remembered
him
then, of course, that giant body bare before
12
