808
PARTISAN REVIEW
"I swear you really
want
the brat," I cried exasperated, and full
of a pity with which I could not come to terms, but let break from
me in rage. "You've wished this on us."
"What if I have? What then?" She sat down, lurching a little,
as one surrendering, undoing her words.
"Oh Lord, don't cry, don't cry," I railed at the tears of weakness
that brimmed and broke, brimmed and broke past letting (I thought
incongruously of a stopped toilet-bowl, the greasy inevitable rise and
overflow of slow water) at her eyes' margins. "I hate tears. I hate
women who exploit them."
"And I hate you!" she wailed, grabbing me, kissing me, kissing
me, until I tasted the taste of her mouth, the drug's taste inhabiting
her. We trembled together as if what scared us were not ourselves, but
we were rather its solution, and crouched, I could feel the articula–
tion of her pelvis, bone against my bone, imagine the monster that
would swell her presently, innocent in its bloody caul.
I could not tell her my vision: the slow terror of being a child,
and the inevitable fall to hair, to awkwardness, to evil from that
imbecile partial grace; how I could not will that indignity for any
not myself. I talked, instead, of money, of our unstable life, of all the
weak, customary lies against parenthood. And I ended by smashing
a chair against the floor, splintering the legs, strewing about us a
pattern of sawdust; and I cried out that I wished I were dead but
I did not wish it and the ebb of my anger was fear, and I said in
my aching head, "I did not mean it!" and aloud to my wife, "Have
it, damn it all, let's have the thing. God save the child!"
Next day she aborted, and for forty-eight hours I could not touch
her, remote on the sour bed where she composed and recomposed
the meaning of her hair against the pillow. I watched her faintly
granulated eyelids flicker over the pupil's paleness and I thought I
did not like her, weak and mourning a meaningless puddle of blood.
But when she reached toward me, in a known fragile gesture, her
hand, I knew it was I that she mourned and I said, "Dear, dear,"
kissing the rise of that breast no kid had tugged, and I suffered the
tender insult of her pity.
So I was assailed on one side and on the other, by the threat
of birth, by the threat of death, and they debouched both in death's
actuality, though I did not yet believe that Hal would really die for
