AN EXPENSE OF SPIRIT
the peace from which, for a little, I departed, and to which I would
return. Noel held me tight with one hand; he must have grabbed
me in the street to prevent, God knows why, my slipping off, and now
he had simply forgotten his grasp. He did not join our discussion ever,
but would squeeze my arm, when something obscurely moved him,
inside his immense unheeding clasp until I almost screamed in pain.
It was his money, a crumpled wad he laid on the table before him,
that bought our beers, and he watched fiercely to be sure he was
getting his money's worth; we performed like beasts, incapable of
knowing what would please the onlooker.
At first Timothy talked, quickly, delicately, but with only half–
concealed ennui, lapsing quite soon, or pretending to, into drunkenness,
and in the end I was the only one who persisted against Goodman's
spasms of abuse and anguish. Simone would follow our points with
great nods of agreement, or noiseless expostulations of dissent, finger–
ing his neck, and sweating profusely, but his only spoken comment
was the interjection with which he had begun. "You didn't answer
him! That's no answer. That's- " and he would, apparently with
the sense of having contributed something, sink mumbling beneath
the tide of argument. Speech is for me customarily a temptation rig–
orously suppressed, but that evening the few beers, the sense of an
outrageous holiday, betrayed me into indulgence, an orgy of words,
while Noel, remote, bitterly compelled me, his great head cupped in
one hairy paw, the other still clutching me. He listened, not in the con–
tempt I would have expected, but avidly as if at any moment we
might solve the riddle he could not himself even pose.
I remember clearly only the end of our talk. "Love!" Goodman
had cried, and it was somehow the point toward which the long
evening had been bearing us, far past supper and vaguely hungry, but
held by some more ultimate hunger to that table, those words. Only
Noel watched in silence from the furry ambush of
his
hand, unable
to afford drunkenness or speech; his head moved from speaker to
speaker intently and pain sat without conviction in his eyes. "Love–
a lie! Love your neighbor! Love! Charity! These words, I hate. Tell
the truth, who can we love? A neighbor? Not even our wives, our
children, not even ourselves. A certain camaraderie, yes, allowances
we make-yes-"
"But look now," I tried to begin, "in the
Symposium-"
17
