PARTISAN REVIEW
her voice betrayed nothing. "Good night, Mr. Brandler."
An
uncus–
tomary access of rage shook my body, and I looked hopelessly down
at my meager arms. In the car, where I sat as far from Noel as I
could, he turned on me ferociously.
"If
you were wondering, I beat
her. I like it! You should try it sometime."
"1- 1-"
"Shut up!" he said.
I find
it
difficult to remember more than snatches of the rest
of that night; why I did not somehow leave him I have never been
able properly to explain to myself. We drank with a single-mindedness
and fury I would not have believed possible, moving from place to
place and in each of them Noel seemed, at least to my wavering eye,
no less sober, though sometimes he would thump his gross resonant
body without mercy, roaring, "A man, goddamn it-a
man. .
No
one has to look twice at me!" For an hour at a time he would talk
to me gently, pleading with me not to leave him, gripping my shoul–
ders with his brute frantic hands, and then, in an inexplicable surge
of malice, scream at me over a drink, "Drink it down, goddamn it!
I'm paying for it." But when I would raise the glass to my lips, he
would thump my back suddenly, making me splutter and choke, while
the whole bar rang with drunken laughter.
When the last saloon had closed, we went into a hamburger
stand for a cup of coffee; there was in the place, in the shining
silver urns that mocked our faces, the quiet whirr of the ventilating
fans and the soft sizzling of frying hamburgers, a kind of peace that
seemed to invade even Noel. He sat on the stool that beneath his
great hams looked absurdly small, his head in
his
hands, that mar–
tyred, inarticulate face relaxed over the almost antiseptic whiteness
of the counter; he looked like sleep and I dared for the first time to
yield to my own weariness.
A couple of high-school kids barged in behind us, loud in the
hushed drone of the place, letting a wedge of cold into the somnolent
warmth of our refuge. "What a babe," one of them was saying,
"yah-hoooo!" and "Quiet, shmo," the other. I could imagine with–
out turning around the terrible pinched cockiness of their faces, the
skin marred with hair and pimples, the meaningless canny eyes that
did not yet know they would some day die. They had left the door
open and a mean blast, chill with the last of darkness, swept in on us.
22
