THE FEAR OF INNOCENCE
793
Hal would make from time to time in the direction of her noises,
a series of incomprehensible confiding nods and winks.
Dinner was good; we ate steak full of gross, sweet bloodiness,
meat cut from the dark genital regions of beasts not butchered by
pious Jews. Always at Carrie's we ate steak or shell-fish; what to our
believing grandfathers had been abomination, and to our rationalist
fathers somehow still distasteful, had for us a delicate flavoring of
the unclean, a charming
souPfon
of venial sin.
But the drinks were the evening's meaning and until they were
in us we could not unspell our disparate tongues. We'd had a shot
of Carrie's oldest rye before the meal, choking discreetly only a
little, and red wine with the dinner and after, liqueurs, brandy,
Cura~ao,
Benedictine, Aquavit, not choosing one but some of each,
then more-The new liquor cabinet was Hal's toy and we tried
everything with secret belches and false cries of ravishment; after–
wards we went back to the Rye and then Vodka straight and a little
Dubonnet, and then the mixed drinks. It made no difference; we dis–
liked the taste of all of
it
equally and over us hung the fear of not
getting drunk enough, of seeming to hold back.
Boys will drink anything in their anguished flight from child–
hood, but our elaborate and jejune fall was motivated by more than
the mere impulse to leave no sense virgin, more even than the simple
hunger for evil-the sickening sweet plunge toward absolute abdica–
tion of the will.
You will not believe, perhaps, how little we said to each other
in those preliminary stages beyond the necessary common denomina–
tor of requests and acknowledgments.
"Rye?"
"Yes
!"
"Gin?"
"No!"
"More?"
"Please
!"
More audible than speech, our breathing, the creaking of a
chair under us, the sound of ice and glass, flesh and wood possessed
the apartment until it seemed a whore's room, without conversation,
alive only with the mechanical noises of a minimum satisfaction.
By the time Hal, wavering like wheat in the floor's center, had
