THE FEAR OF INNOCENCE
815
"She wants to talk to me! Talk! Just a minute until I tuck my
tail between my legs. There are ladies present. Shall we begin our con–
versation now, or would you rather wait for tea?"
"Don't be a clown, please!"
"What shall we talk about: books, movies, the degeneracy of
cities, the negro problem, the- "
"Please,
please!"
I sat up and banged my fist hard into a pillow:
one,
two, three,
one,
two, three, but it didn't help. "Well?"
"It's ridiculous to try to talk to you now. You've been frustrated
for once and you've just lost control of yourself completely. Why must
you be so-adolescent!"
There was some truth in it, of course; I ached with what had
surged in me and been baffled, despised but could not let my animal
resentment. But more, my failure to come to terms with Hal's death,
my absurd complicity in Carrie's delusions, my muddled defeat over
our almost-child, my cumulative, petty guilts harrassed me. And over
all, the next day's fear of loneliness and exile and ennui, impossible
adequately to confess or exorcise (one would simply have had to cry,
and that relief is perversely forbidden to men among us), was busy
with its haunting. There should have been dignity, some calm at
least at the heart of departure to redeem it for memory.
"Oh foul," I cried, "unfair!" at the ineluctable untidiness of
it all.
And saying, "I'm sorry," Vivian rose, walked over to pluck again
the curtain's edge.
I got up and stood beside her, letting the intermittent light of the
electric signs below splash my face, like hers, with another violence,
noiseless and indifferent.
"I knew him," she said at last.
"Knew who?"
"Knew Hal. Odd that I'd forgotten."
"Knew Hal where? What are you trying to say?"
"I remember now, remembered when I saw those pictures on
Carrie's wall. It was at a picnic once in Ann Arbor. He sat beside
me. There was a fire, and I think- I don't really recall-he kissed
me."
They would fall together now I knew (and the knowing of it was
