274
PARTISAN REVIEW
"Who did
you
fall in love with?" said Paddles, directing
his
question to Tobias.
"She had braces on her teeth," said Gabriel, thinking that the
question had been directed at him, and fondly remembering
his
childhood ambition and lust, "and her bust was nine years in the
future, but my knees shook when I looked at her and once she
made me wet my pants!"
"Listen," said Paddles to Gabriel, "I'd like to hear about how
she made you wet your pants, but some other time. I don't care
if she grew up to be Hedy LaMarr, right now I want to know what
happened to this guy when he fell in love. How about it?" he said
to Tobias, looking at him sharply but sympathetically.
"Maybe it was the same girl you fell in love with! But never
mind that, it's too complicated. She was very nice and very pretty,"
said Tobias, pain on his face. "No: she was
not
nice at all, she was
a witch, and I was the only one who thought she was very pretty
or nice. Everyone else just thought she was pretty and some did not
think she was pretty at all, but just neat, neat and mean."
"-And she must have been in love with some other guy," said
Paddles sadly.
"At first it seemed like that," said Tobias, "and that was exactly
what she said, that she was in love with someone else, but maybe
she would forget about him, and she said that she would marry me
if she ever married anyone at all, she could not imagine being mar–
ried to anyone but me, which was a very nice thing to say and had
me in a fine glow for weeks. But then when the other guy divorced
his wife and asked her to marry him, she refused him, and came to
tell me that she now wanted very much to marry me. But I had
fallen in love with a much nicer girl."
"Was she just in love with herself?" asked Paddles, reduced to
a schoolboy's tone by the nature of the conversation and his passion–
ate interest in
it.
"For a while I thought that was what was wrong," said Tobias.
"But I decided after a time that she was not in love with herself
either. She hated herself and she hated men, just like Emma, though
not in the same way."
"How did you figure all that out?" asked Paddles.
"It's not very hard to figure out something like that," said
