THE FEAR OF INNOCENCE
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viciously and with deliberation into a political argument, while drunks
carefully piloted their flushed, impervious heads between us, or
howled across our recriminations, recognitions and farewells.
I was a little drunk myself for I was going home, but scarcely
drunk enough to excuse me. I slipped off for the bar and a drink
in the midst of one of Dan's ungainlier sentences, and when I'd
managed to get back through the crowds that would yield me head–
way only as the begrudged resultant of its own gay, purposeless
thrust and heaving, he had disappeared.
Dan is not his name. I should in any case have had to call him
for the story's sake some name not his; but I swear I do not remem–
ber, though he cued my pilgrimage, brought me to that door and
my beginning, what he was really called.
II
I was still drunk when I got to Frisco, drunk enough to
take the curse off the land's rigidity; the pavements without resilience,
the inelastic rigor of the horizon seemed to roll with me; the eye
was slaked in its own humors. The foot has an unexpected nostalgia
for oceans; it is easy, you know, walking a deck to time the stride
so that the whole dark, spongy mass of the sea seems to sink with
the foot's falling, rise at the release of the sole's pressure.
But it is not only the illusion of mastery of what one walks that
is lost leaving water; the lines are heaved on to the splintering dock
with its colloidal fringe of garbage in oil-slick, are made fast; and
one declares to the uniformed inquisitor that he returns to arid cities
and the accustomed flora of his childhood bearing only a) one
J
ap
pistol (decommissioned) b) three rolls of silk (red) c) two ounces of
perfume (cheap) in the carved Koa wood container. With so slight
a confession, one is shriven, perhaps forever, of the Proustian ennuis
of the sea, its architecture of terror, the loveliest uses of leisure and
solitude.
As always at one point of my drunkenness, sweating out toward
nausea the inevitable binge of coming ashore (for one cannot move
directly ever from shipboard to the landsman's land you others possess
without effort, but must pass, as the sandhog upward from muck
to daylight, through the decompression chamber of the sailor's city:
the whitewashed storefronts behind which one gets a bath for a
