THE FEAR OF INNOCENCE
B05
Hal's exegesis, "for normality"), yet singly, at least, and I came to
terms, blushing and glancing over my shoulder, with platitudes and
gentleness. Behind there was Hal fixed in my abanaoned attitudes, a
wax-works of reproach and boyhood; and what in that wax head
I might address I could not really imagine.
Of Vivian, in particular, I could tell him nothing ("Vivian sends
her regards" and in return, "Give my regards to your wife." He would
never trouble to remember her name), how we had discovered quiet–
nesses in ourselves that we had not known we were imploring and
were content, and how where desire failed we did not. No one, I
suppose, has ever been so startled at the simple chastity of marriage,
and if the motions we made in its honor were to the outsider's eye
stuffiness and selfish withdrawal, that was the eye's error and not
the meaning of the dance. (I do not mean to tell you, where I am
saying so much, that our marriage was all blitheness without blemish;
the collapse of ourselves would startle us sometimes into mutual
assault, or the obdurate heart suspect the gimick of peace, try sullen–
ness. But that could be to Hal all the less confessed.)
So Hal and I abandoned presentness, fell back upon the pitiful
lien of recollection, piously naming the situations in which we had
once, or thought so, achieved oneness. What we both knew we con–
fided over and over, what we could not evoke we named; no ghosts
came to us but we stubbornly haunted our unreal pastness. The true
pasts with which we were still continuous we mutually ignored; they
had lived underground, under our friendship, and only now, after
the fact, we discovered what we had been meaning and had not known
how to suspect.
We cried each to himself "deceived" and "deceiver" to the
other. Only where we hurt we knew that we had touched one an–
other, and we stuttered incredulously, bitterly toward alienation.
Toward the end, after a year of silence which had to do for
the tentatively composed avowals of hostility that we never quite sent,
I had a note from Hal asking for a street map of Ann Arbor where
he had been at school, and I had met my wife, married and was
then living. "I'm doing a story ... " his offhand tone, not amiable
but assuming amiability, denied the motives of my embarrassment.
Unwittingly or not the request mocked me, and though I resolved to
