796
PARTISAN REVIEW
I felt, whirling toward sleep's center
in
the homeward taxi (I
had not heard Carrie call it-focussed for a moment only as the
lights snapped up and I gave my address), a nausea at all tender–
nesses of women; and Hal and I fell apart, cleft down our center of
communicating brightness by the dark, by cold and the cab's lurching,
hurled each to his window, each at last to his own home.
I moved through the dark rooms from the door to my bed,
kicking a chair in muddled resentment, while my mother pretended
to sleep, unwilling to offend me further by seeming to have waited
up for my return and my father coughed in his sleep beside her.
Meanwhile Hal (I thought dimly, falling, falling) was settled now
into the female darkness of his fatherless house, around him the small
rustling breaths of his sisters and the smell of urine from the bed of
his cancerous mother, fitfully swooning from her long pain; and
Carrie (I knew as sleep twitched from me my poisoned body) lay,
forgetting Hal's uneasy jerk from under her hand's farewell pressure
and the emptiness of the hallway after us, proud of what she pos–
sessed, in the blackness, alone.
I have been as drunk since though rarely enough to recall each
episode: once at a Christmas party in a shoestore in Philadelphia
while the star salesman, a fairy, blushed and squealed, goosed by
the nightstick of a corner cop, and one of the stocking girls puked
over a railing on to the Porter who lay,
his
leg broken, on the base–
ment landing; once at a Junior Officers' Mess on Saipan where the
rats would leap at us when we went out to make water at the edge
of the boondocks, and Dogherty with whom I had been arguing
Canon Law, slipped suddenly from the wavering level of my sight,
only his hand frozen on to the bar in a baffled gesture toward the
triple whiskey he had ordered to beat Closing; once in Shanghai
with a couple of Korean girls who played the drums and had no
hair on their bodies; and in Ann Arbor the night someone had
poured perfume into my drink and I punched ·two holes in the wall.
They were all of them satisfactorily bestial, degrading; and yet they
failed me, they failed what I remembered of that night at Carrie's.
To begin with, one learns to like this drink more, that less; to
abide, in part at least, the etiquette of such abandonments. The very
throat is conditioned by memories of nausea, and one submits to an
