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PARTISAN REVIEW
crouched at the bedside or collapsed on the floor. She would wake
up the next morning completely refreshed. She had bathed and break–
fasted and had called up Paco to plan their day together when their
companions of the night before still lay comatose in darkened chambers.
Paco liked her for her flat impartial sandpaper ruthlessness which,
though harsh on first impression, did not leave rough edges on one's
feelings but a tingling smoothness. The moist childhood with his
mother had cloyed his loins with piteousness; he liked his women
dry, and had found so congenial a wife in Mary because Mary too
(though she might look so tender-hearted) hugged a thrift of senti–
ment as grim as his own. He and she had stepped over the prostrate
bodies of their respective families to marry: she, abandoning a boozy
father whom she had quietly supported since she was fifteen because
he considered himself too hopelessly an artist to work; he, abandoning
his uncomplaining mother to a pension and her relatives in Macao. He
never had to feel his way around Mary: she was so much himself as
to seem his twin; and in the first weeks of his friendship with the
senora de Vidal he found no difficulty in writing Mary about it.
Mary,
reading the letters in Hong Kong, rather anxiously smiled at his in–
genuousness.
He said that he found the senora a refreshing haven of neutrality
but really meant that he liked feeling at home among her tea-cups
and having her fine car to drive around
as
though it were his own.
He did not think much of the people she ran around with but he en–
joyed their collective sparkle and audacity. He had never met her
husband nor any of her children-she had had four sons by her first
marriage; a daughter by her second-but this absence of her family
seemed natural enough since she spoke of them very freely and so often
-her husband had made such-and-such a speech; her two sons that
were killed in the war had been posthumously decorated; her daughter
Connie, recently married, was learning to cook-that Paco sometimes
felt they were all in the next room, awaiting a cue to come in . ..
though they were never in the next room; and he realized that if
she too had indeed stepped over her family, her duty to them fulfilled,
to do some private living, she was not making conversational moun–
tains out of her step for nosey people to climb and explore. Paco was
not nosey; she could omit even the molehills: the ground was always
clearing before them. Yet their relationship, which should have ranged
unhampered over more and more cleared ground, since they had re–
fused from the start all the dense hedging between men and women,
