788
PARTISAN REVIEW
it concerned us; footnoted by scholars and parsed by virgins, the
text seemed foreign to what we were after in the parked car, pushed
silently down driveways while our fathers slept, the warm, damp,
inexpert fretting toward a consummation scared and unconvinced:
"Well, got my ashes hauled, dunked the love-muscle," the smug,
depreciatory metaphor), we could see that Carrie had slipped noise–
less from the room, left unbroken the mechanical train of translation.
"That day first of joy and first of evils the cause was-was the
cause; nor indeed by appearance and by reputation moved, not now
secret love Dido meditated-no longer did Dido meditate secret
love: marriage she called it, and with this name covered-uh–
'culpam,''' the reciter paused and queried for the word's forgotten
meaning the desk whose emptiness he now first noticed.
" 'Sin,' you jerk!" someone whispered from behind him.
"Yes, 'sin,''' Carrie repeated at the door again, "though per–
haps 'blame' would be better or 'guilt.' 'Culpa-guilt,' it's a word that
should be familiar to you all by this time."
We knew where she had been, had learned to note in a slight
sucking-in of her lips the confession of triumph. The odor of ciga–
rette smoke had reached her finicky nose from across the hallway,
and she had pounced, caught in the girls' toilet some furtive smoker.
We could see how, under her eye, disinfectant as the deodorants that
purged that grey room, the blithe adult non-conformist had shrunk,
while the lip-stained cigarette whirled, soaked and shredded in the
toilet-bowl, into the small girl, frightened and insolent; and our
hum and titter as Carrie settled behind her desk was a kind of con–
temptuous applause that she acknowledged hushing it.
But Carrie had fallen in love with Hal. Hal who was in her class
then, lean, with those pale eyes that showed in photographs blank
and smoky as marbles, would walk beside me home from school, try–
ing on attitudes, justifying. "Oh my God!" he would cry, striking
his chest with the impossible Wolfe-ian gesture, and tilting toward
the sky the head that might be, if it survived its apprenticeship, some–
day noble, "I'm not
laying
her, you know. I've only kissed her once."
We stopped for Napoleons at a bakery shop, and our talk up
th~
untidy avenue blurred in the cream-filling and the flakes of dough.
"But you're a whore. That much is clear."
