470
PARTISAN REVIEW
stone and had an open balustraded porch in front, three steps up from
the street, with a pair of stone lions flanking the top step. Paco saw
it was a temple. In the open doorway, just clear of the rain, sat an old
bearded Chinaman, sucking a long pipe; down the darkness behind
him, candles remotely flickered. Connie got out with the doll-she
would not let Paco accompany her-and ran up the porch, nodded to
the Chinaman, and passed into the darkness. When she came out, in
about ten minutes, she was no longer carrying the doll. She did not
say where she had been and he did not ask. He drove her to her
house where, alighting, she said he could take the car with him: she
would send someone to pick it up next day.
When she did not turn up at the club the following nights, he
remembered that she had said goodbye, not good-night, as he drove
away, too fatigued by the night's emotions to take notice. He remem–
bered the wistful shut, open, and shut again of the word in her mouth,
and how she had turned away quickly when he dully looked up from
the wheel. He remembered her tears in the moonlight and the wet wind
in her hair and how tenderly she had brooded over the doll, cradled
in her arms, and the shrewd peace in her face when she came out of
the dark temple. He remembered her mouth closing and unclosing
against his throat as they drove to his hotel and he knew now that she
had been praying frantically all the time: those were prayers that he
had thought were kisses. He felt no curiosity; he had forgotten his
resentment and spite; he only knew that his bones were being borne
helplessly flowing in a magnetic flood and that he must fight the
currents; that he must not be dragged to her, but she to him-for
the gravity pulled as suavely her way as his and must ultimately bear
her swaying against him.
And when at closing time one night, two weeks after they had
parted, he came out of the club and saw the yellow convertible waiting
and her face at the window, the world around him swiftly lost impact;
the babble of departing folk faded remotely; the moonlight turned fluid
and he found himself being washed into her car, his every step the
graduated motion of a figure in a delayed movie. While the car swam
through the moonlight they sat and swayed, now touching, now apart–
like two reeds in a stream-and could not talk, could not hold out
arms, so heavily whirled the waters around them. But when the car
stood still before his hotel, the tides stopped too; he turned around
and she met him and they flowed into each other's flesh, their swarm–
ing arms entangled, their breath mingled. He opened the car's door
to bear her out and she strained to follow but seemed rooted to the
