811
PARTISAN REVIEW
I was suddenly spent, weary past all belief, and I fell back on
the bed telling myself, "I didn't enjoy it! I had to! I had to! I didn't
enjoy it!" My right arm quivered senselessly, and looking down I
saw that what I felt as a foreign object at its end was my fist, still
clenched.
"You animal!" she cried finding breath at last, and lifting to–
ward me her ruined face, the tear-swelled eyes, the marred mouth,
"Oh you'll kill this one, too! You'll kill this one, too!" She was sitting
up now on the floor, rocking back and forth, her belly cradled in a
tender gesture that I could not misunderstand.
"You're pregnant again?"
"I wanted it so-I was going to tell you, to be born while you're
gone. Oh, I hate you. No one can do this to me, no one. It's, it's-"
There was no word for that enormity, past speech, past tears;
she rose unsteadily, tried silence, pressing her head against the window
pane.
"Go wash your face. Put some cold water on that lip." She was
so ugly injured, it was almost an offense; that, abominably, I could
feel, but to what was crucial, that she had tricked me into fatherhood
which perhaps with my blow I had undone, that her need to tell
me had motivated our discrepancy of desire, to that I could not
respond, dry, dry, dry-
"I didn't know," I said, "I really didn't know."
"Oh Lord, can't you count?" and adding the days I saw that
I should have known, that it was so.
"Please, Viv, wash your face." I could not muster pity for her
yet, but, uneasy, foresaw that bruised face, anomalous in the crowded
station of my departure.
When she returned from the bathroom, from the noise of water
and the one overheard sob, her face was shiny and blotched, a new
trickle of blood distinct at one corner of her mouth that she had,
astonishingly, lip-sticked. "Oh, if you've killed it," she cried.
"If
you've killed it! How I hate you!"
"Oh, to Hell with it all," I said tired, through with anger.
Those were our last words until I had boarded the train. We
slept that night badly (whenever I woke I could hear Vivian's breath,
pretending sleep to mock my wakefulness), taut on the double bed,
each rolled to his very edge, scrupulously not touching; aching and
