802
PARTISAN REVIEW
I was yelling at the end, and it had become clear to Kitty that
there were no more drinks in it for her; she heaved herself from the
seat, that fat flesh quivering a little. "Shit on you, Karl Marx!" she
said, and left me there to the laughter, the train's racket, the dark,
and closing in on us now, closer, closer, the threat of homecoming.
III
I came up into New York as into daylight and I had not
expected it.
It
was as if, after the long noise of the plane's coming,
its guns' inauspicious patter, and at last the bomb's brief screaming–
there was the explosion; yonder; seen and not for us; off our beam
the bright flowering; a spectacle merely and not what we had dreamed
of and waked to the engines' usual trembling, and dreamed again
and waked, saying, "Not yet, not really, not this time."
I was, to begin with, sober; for sleep had sapped me unawares
at the trip's ending and I awoke after arrival, under the Porter's hand,
spared all false farewells, to a pleasant haze of collecting my gear,
checking it, being separated. Coming from such utter sleep to another
initiation, my last Navy pay in my pocket and the cheerful, unreal
literature of the Separation Center, I felt a child with the bribe of
ice-cream in a world of well-intentioned adult liars; all deceit, I
almost cried, is a function of love!
The day, after the languors of the train, was so full of quick
detail, endless wherever one entered. Besides, there was sunlight on
the city, a diffuse and hearty whiteness that the streets bore well,
with a dirty nobility I had not foreseen. Given the noise of the wed–
ding, the sentimental cries of relatives, the conspiracy of lights, the
veil on the sluttish bride seems not an irony, but, well, sufficient!
Briefly the image of my wife, I confess it, interpolated itself
among the stone faces of buildings, but briefly only; I denied it, for
I knew where I must first go, the willed What among all given, un–
chosen ends to which I must return.
I was going to see Carrie. Dan, Kitty, the sea, the protests of
whores and the failures of enemy fire (List the influences on the Ro–
mantic Movement. Comment on one. Where does the will begin?)
had prompted me through ten thousand miles and the recurring am–
biguities of choice, but chiefly, I suppose, I had been driven by
