THE FEAR OF INNOCENCE
791
of publication we're after. The Commies, right?" and his face, the
boy-scout as villain, would almost wink.
What tenderness he felt lived underground, confessed in signs
I could not then read: perhaps the growing edge of irritation that
flawed his voice, the cumulative failure of feeling in him and his
compensatory rhetorical excess (he came to
shout
what passion he
claimed, like some actor, deaf and blind crying desperately his un–
heard lines to an audience whose presence he cannot verify); just
so the guilt he would not otherwise acknowledge was betrayed in the
acne along his back that sent him periodically scurrying for the doc–
tor's reassurance and the sunlamp.
Certainly he was brusque and condescending to Carrie that night
I first had dinner at her house; his leg hooked over the arm of the
chair, the precise casualness of the cigarette ash tapped off on to the
rug's dead center mocked the anxious charm of the suburban apart–
ment, the lonely terror of its tidiness.
When Carrie (Hal called her that insouciantly enough though
never without a glance at me, while I, who could say Reither that
nor "Miss Stone," called her nothing) gave me in brief greeting her
hand, I saw with a start of pity and repulsion, in the mottled flesh
slack between her knuckles, the age the firmness of her face denied;
and I could sense in the instant pressure an entreaty for toler,ance
shameful in its abandonment.
"Good evening," she said and I, "Good evening," and we sat
in mutual discomfort, so patently the lay-figures in a demonstration
(she could foresee and fore-suffer, I suppose, the unremitting inso–
lence with which Hal would continue to thrust upon their intimacy
my arrogant young hunger for "material." He needed, for there was
in
him
fatally a drive to tum what was most private into the Per–
formance, the commandeered cognizance of my envy and contempt;
and so
w~
would play, whenever I returned to Carrie's house, a cu–
rious game, mutually unconfessed: looking for a manuscript, let's
say, Hal would open a drawer, showing me over his shoulder his own
pajamas obscenely folded away among Carrie's dark, familiar clcthes;
or he would leave slightly ajar the bedroom door, "Excuse us for a
moment," behind which he was discussing with her his allowance;
or he might set carelessly open on the table beside me the latest letter
from Carrie: " . . . forgive a silly old woman, and when you've
