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PARTISAN REVIEW
a hurdy-gurdy man, understood how much of my lie she had seen in
her assertion, "I know you will."
But strangely, and it is one of those incredible perversities of
which only the human animal is capable, I became less honest with
her than more honest. She became to me like a person from whom
one borrows money. You come to blame that person, to hate that
person, to hold
him
guilty of your debt, accuse him in your mind of
having hatched the loan as a conspiracy to humiliate you. And it
was worse with Margaret. She had given, not loaned, me her honesty.
I felt I must repay her with my dishonesty.
I plotted to pump a bellows against the coals of her attraction
to me. I was mildly attracted to that striking white and black appear–
ance of hers, and could carry out my plot because the smallest gesture
of feeling would make her believe I loved her. She had said to me,
"When you are in love, you swell the accidental brush of the little
finger of the person you love into his hand upon your heart."
Thus, on a very clear, cold morning when we were out walking,
the
air
like crystal the voice crashes with each word, I called her
"Margie." Her breath gathered the crash of the name and breathed
its fragments back into her lungs that worked to preserve it, as one
might glue together the fragments of an heirloom, a broken bowl.
The name was a caress of my tongue, a kiss, that she would come to
feel as bits of glass slicing the interior of her breast, leaving scars that
reopened to wounds.
And now, remembering the moment, I understand why someone
like Margaret falls in love with someone like myself, as I was then.
It is the love of the complicated for the ingenuous, of the master for
the pupil, of the tragic for the comic, the tragic seeing too late that
the comedy has turned grotesque.
In reality, Margaret was much more of a psychologist than I
was. She was making a fight against complication, and I was, in a
sense, her weapon. "Margie" put a sword in her hand, and she went
about all the clear cold day laughing and crashing the air. She was
on the level of gaiety where love must most often live.
One night when I was at her apartment listening to her records
of
La Traviata,
after she had stopped the music and begun talking
to me, I said to her, "I like your voice more than the singer's. Don't
play any more records. Just talk to me." What I thought was, "At
