816
PARTISAN REVIEW
a vertigo I had dreamed many times before surely) my two lives:
Hal's world and Vivian's, the denial of innocence and its affrrmation,
the boy's fall and the man's grace.
It
had been a sentimental lie,
their disjunction, for
I
had persisted, and I, inescapably my begin–
ning, impugned my end. Unless there was another prayer not yet
prayable....
I had imposed upon Vivian, scanting for its sake her real hu–
manity, a role more than human, making her the sign of another
dispensation, anti-Hal, a profane salvation. The trivial coincidence
of circumstance now revealed was no matter; it showed what I should
have known without the exemplum of fact, without so vulgar an
epiphany, what was true always: that we inhabit, all of us, the con–
tinuous kingdom of evil. But that which should have confirmed and
enriched my love for her prompted me to revenge my merited distress
on Vivian. I prepared now my utter indignity. "Oh, you
think,
you
don't really recall if he kissed you!"
"You're not offended. I saw him only that once.
It
was, you
know, nothing-more Springtime than anything, hardly personal."
"Hardly personal!" I felt shamed taking up her words compul–
sively with that simple-minded reflex of irony, but I scarcely knew
what else to say; there was no way, after all, of justifying for her the
sick anger that possessed me. "Perhaps you don't 'really recall' that he
took you behind the bushes, hauled down your 'hardly personal' pants
and-"
"If
you must be disgusting, at least keep your voice down."
I had begun to shout a little, and beyond the thin walls that flanked
us, we could hear the listeners stirring, old lonely faces, settling now
for their evening's excitement.
"Well, did he?"
"Did who what?"
"Did that joker lay you?" When I said it, my voice caught in
the distorting whisper, nausea took me, and wrenched apart in the
sick spasm, I saw myself, lost, the self-lacerating performer. "Fool,"
I cried, "weep. Ask forgiveness! " But I would not listen.
"Did he? Did he?" She did not, of course, answer. "Oh, sweet
sorrow of parting, those last, lovely, chaste embraces- "
Vivian was trembling; it would have been easy for her to cry,
but she preferred anger, would not abandon me even here. "I can't
