AN EXPENSE OF SPIRIT
trollable urgency in Goodman's voice. "I have a couple bottles beer
on ice-"
"Good night,"
I
cried again, fighting for my footing, almost
at the door. "Goodman, good night!"
"You'll come next week. We'll all meet here after the discussion.
A
regular thing.
A
good talk-" his voice trembled toward silence.
"Brandler, you at least-" he called after us, without certainty, and
looking backward through the plate-glass door,
I
saw
him
for the
last time, shaking Timothy's elegant dumb shoulder, furiously and
mvrun.
"Crap!" Noel shouted at the closed door, and "Crap!" once
more as the dark autumnal air bitterly assailed our hot damp faces.
"That guy's nuts!"
"Yes," I said, "he's really nuts." I felt somehow as if I had be–
trayed, assenting so easily, his last appeal, and more, had undone in
the casual judgment, my father, myself. Surely, I had more in com–
mon with the abandoned Jew than this gross, violent hulk. "He's
lonely," I added quickly, "lonely."
"Lonely," Noel said quite softly; it was the first time I had
heard his voice in anything less than a shout.
"He's
lonely! Holy
Christ." In what was surely anguish, he released my arm at last, but
it was no longer possible for me to leave him.
"That fairy," he said with the air of continuing, as if we had
been, all the time not knowing it, on that very subject, and he waved
backward contemptuously toward the saloon we were leaving, "that
goddarnn literary-who the hell even knows
if
he
is
a fairy? He looks
like one, don't he?" We had moved together toward his parked car;
for me there was no question of choice, and as we drove off through
the booming lighted streets I did not even trouble to notice where
we were headed. "Well, don't he?"
"Doesn't he
what?"
It
was hard for me to stay awake; the
strange exhilaration to which I had yielded blurred around its edges
to sleep.
"Look like a fairy to you?"
"Who?"
"Holy Christ, who? Cargill. Timothy Cargill."
"Could be," I said, still not quite certain what was at stake
and unwilling to offend
him.
Noel didn't seem satisfied, but drove
19
