PARTISAN REVIEW
in furious silence toward darker streets lined with trees and the pale
shadows of private houses. Once, feeling I had not met his challenge,
I said again, "Could be," but he would not even turn toward me.
"My house," he said finally, in vast disgust, pulling up to the
curb, but he made no move to get out. "Look," he said patiently,
"you can't be drunk on six beers. You read books. I'm not a dolt
myself. I read things, too. Christ, it's no
crime
to read the
Saturday
Evening Post.
But this Proust, this Joyce-they beat me. What the
hell!"
I understood. I am not used to the messiness of such situations
in real life, but the problems of fiction are not without their own com–
plexity, and it is impossible to deal with them for long without ac–
quiring a certain acuity. "You are trying to tell me that this Timothy
has interested your wife in Proust and Joyce and you don't like it?"
"Hell, that ain't the half of it. Let her read what she likes, it's a
free country. But she looks at me as if-as if she's
sorry
for me.
I mean, when I want her she's not
there.
Not really there." He looked
at me without hope, poking a thick contemptuous finger at my chest.
"Look! Look at this arm. I'm
there,
I've always been there. What a
woman wants I've got. Hell, you wouldn't know."
I laughed nervously, not knowing what to say and wishing I were
in my own room preparing for bed, warming my final cup of coffee
on the single electric burner. We got out of the car, Noel leaping
for the pavement as if it were a smoking beach; I half expected him
to shout, "This is it!" and giggled sharply in the dark, but if he heard
me he made no sign.
Through a slightly open window, music was coming toward us,
thick tangled atonal chords, somewhat absurd in that quiet suburban
street. It is not the kind of music I would myself have chosen, pre–
ferring (I have a small record-player in my room ) the gentler resolu–
tions of the seventeenth century, but I was struck for the moment
by its sense of conflict: the player fighting the genius of his instru–
ment, the development, the logic of melody.
It
was a triumph of the
will, raw, showy,
there;
Noel should have liked it, but he didn't get
it.
"You see," he said to me as if it were some flagrant evidence
of infidelity. "You see! He lends her those albums," and opening
the door, he bellowed, "Shut it off!"
She must have turned it off as we entered, for the room rang
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