814
PARTISAN REVIEW
at the window, twisting a ruiRed edge of curtain idly in one hand,
her face turned toward the noise of traffic.
"Definitely not."
"Ghosts, ghosts," 1 sighed.
"Oh you played up to her shamelessly!"
"Sure 1 played up to her, poor, cracked thing. What else does
she have? You probably ran around giving the other kids the scoop
on Santa Claus at the age of three. Don't be so damned sure about
ghosts anyhow. There are more things-"
"Oh please. Please!"
Twenty-eight mornings 1 had waked in that room to the racket
of the streetcars and the delicate belching of the city pigeons, Vivian
beside me; tomorrow would be the same, the pigeons, the trolleys, the
uncongenial smell; only lastness would have been added, scarcely
marked in the bustle of packing, but redeeming yet one more triteness
to meaning. The day .after that I would be gone, shipped out.
And suddenly desire, like an unforeseeable pain, the unwilled
recall of a lapsed anxiety, assailed me. Aware dimly of how the secret
history of passion proceeds with paranoic disregard of our words, our
daylight motives, 1 rose to touch Vivian (the hushed fall of my stock–
inged feet gave me a sense of moving from ambush): the discreet
resilience of her
buttock~,
the notched, resisting shoulders, the plump
half-arc of breast seen under the arm raised to the curtain; to
reassure my hands' extravagant pulsing, to confirm what cued my
crouched rigidity.
She swayed ambiguously from uprightness-and 1 pulled her
with me to the bed, thinking that before the final warmth and weari–
ness I wanted to hear the tearing of silk. But when 1 kissed her 1
could taste nothing, and 1 let her roll from me, her unexpected
not-thereness, and we lay side by side not touching, identical, our fists
balled tight and our chins tilted to the darkness that moved now upon
our room from the unseen city.
My awareness of my body had faded, faded almost to nothing,
a finger-nail barely touching some leaden surface, the vague sense of
distant water, sagging between banks with that intolerable heaviness
just before freezing. To feel more would be nausea, and yet 1 dared it.
"For Christ's sake," 1 said. "For Christ's sake. What is it?"
"I want to talk to you."
