294
PARTISAN REVIEW
window glaso: through which I saw the tree and the moon. The table
and the branches were not really burning. It was the moonlight that
painted her face to a mask." But the moon was heavy on my shoul–
ders, and I wanted never to visit Margaret again.
The morning after that night, she came to me. She said that a
fine taper, such as the one she had lit in the middle of the night,
burned very slowly, and that the small bowl was not yet quite full of
tallow. I could not bear her. My plot had succeeded, and I had
no further use for her. Her suffering only made her more intolerable
to me. I told her what I had done and how I felt.
Something cracked in her face, as if her face were a small crystal
bowl that I had smashed. At the time, I saw the crack as that of the
moonlight make-up. The crack made her more horrible.
Something like a brand took shape in her face, as if the crystal
bowl were cut of her flesh and I had ground out a cigarette in it. I
had been reading
The Scarlet Letter,
and I saw an S form in her face.
All she said was, "You wreck things not of the same quality as
yourself."
Then it was that she put on an armor when she had to walk
where I might pass her. And soon afterwards, without taking her
books and records, she went away.
Why do I tell this painful story? I tell it because I must spin
some of the anguish out of my system, the same anguish that Marga–
ret suffered for me. I know the reasonless Italian-opera love, the
desire to have a thousand bowls of tallow, each motion that begins
the first bowl, and I know that the table and the branches are con–
sumed by flame. It is my face whose crack is a horror that causes
laughter. I am now what Margaret was, and another woman, whom
I love, is what I was. I have had a white taper snuffed, a small crystal
bowl smashed, and I have had to fashion an armor in which to walk
the street.
