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PARTISAN REVIEW
room and did their cooking, eating and washing in the foul passages;
where there were no lavatories and the people used the unspeakable
roofless public outhouses-or any corner of the sidewalk. They denied
the heat and the dust and the rats as well as the not quite authentic
glitter of the downtown smart shops and the swanky clubs-for in the
world of their minds, they moved with cool expertness, rich and poor,
among marble halls and ivory baths and luxurious wardrobes; through
streets that were all Park Avenues, where the men were all Pierpont
Morgans, and all the women unaging, unfading Betty Grables. One
might have to eat cold rice and squat on a pail in the outhouse and
sleep on a bug-ridden floor: one sighed and pressed a scented hand–
kerchief to one's nose and invoked the vicarious magic of one's wrist–
watch (just what all the Wall Street tycoons are wearing now) or
of one's evening dress (just what all the New York hostesses are wear–
ing now) against the cold rice, the rank pail, the buggy floor ... One
smiled and floated away, insulated from all the drab horror of inade–
quate reality by the ultra-perfect, colossal, stupendous, technicolored
magnificence of the Great American Dream.
But the strain showed in their faces-in their shifty eyes and
cold sweat and anxious smiles; in the way they tried to walk-and
the frantic way they danced, never for pleasure, never with ease, one
eye always on the audience, sweating from the violence of their exer–
tions and from sheer terror of not being up-to-the-minute, of not making
an impression, of not being able to do what everybody else was
doing . . . So they jerked harder, and laughed more naughtily, and
sweated agonized-while, alone at her table, the senora de Vidal sat
and nibbled watermelon seeds, remaining cool and composed while
the room rioted, and chatting with people round about-until Paco
began to feel that though he fled her and she sat still, he never escaped,
he never moved at all: she was always there behind him, smiling at
his back, and nibbling watermelon seeds.
After only a week, he stopped fleeing and she tracked him down.
He was presently escorting her again everywhere, defiantly-for
were he and she (she asked) the sort of persons to let wagging tongues
wave them this way and that? But he had glimpsed the panic beneath
her poise, and had felt the ground sway at his feet: their desert island
was mined. Neutrals no longer, they fixed boundaries and could not
resume the various commerce of the early days. He was sulky and
nervous with her; she was more attentive, more deferential toward
him; so that, without ever having been lovers, they looked more
like lovers than before.
