776
PARTISAN REVIEW
thirteen or fourteen I had learned down these very streets obedience
without love, the meaning of the state, my drawers bunched under my
sweating buttocks, and in each of my hands, wet and creased under
the rope's fretting, a roped bundle- thirty-six lashed-together boxes,
m each, right shoe and left face to face, conjugally in the secret
tissue.
And some who had brushed me, or opened soft and heedless
as water for my passage, were dead.
I did not stop by the store windows that had made for me
once small ecstasies: the pawnshop'S grill of iron and behind, be–
tween saxophones, the yellow, incredible diamond; or the fronts of
picture~shops
where no one seemed ever to enter (the boy at the
glass could fancy them mere scenic flats for his eye's beguiling, with
beyond perhaps only the grey field between blind walls and the goat
cropping iron), and always in their clutter the same goose nibbling a
child's peeker over the joke in French, or the miraculously opening
eyes of a Christ in chromotone, an easy benediction, if the light lay
right, for the squinter. Stopping, I might have seen on the depthless
glass my furtive image, not the boy's face I continued to imagine
behind the mere somatic changes of my other- that no pilgrimage,
no piety could evoke.
I should not, I suppose, have come back at all to the door, the
unforeseen milk-bottles and the smell, except for meeting Dan, and
Dan I should not have met had I not-but that way is a regression
to the six days of creation or beyond. I had met Dan where all my
parallel impulses of violence and pity, evasion and longing had im–
probably intersected, at sea and moving toward invasion.
We had been playing medicine-ball at the butt-end of the after–
noon, contemptuous of the water's slope and shudder, on the open
deck-space below the bridge, when I first noticed Dan.
It
is a game,
you know, of immense intimacy and aggression; and one soon senses
who has too much at stake, standing close enough to smell each other's
sweat, to see the drops hang quivering on the furrow between nose
and lip; marking what grunt betrays the over-involved prestige,
what crisis of breath is cued by fear and not fatigue.
The gross
whack
of the unyielding ball, slippery with one's own
slipperiness, the f.aces hung with their rigid smiles of comradeliness
