452
PARTISAN REVIEW
thirteen days run over and over through my mind: the shining eyes,
the cries of delight, the applause.
Judith merely stared at me in silence, her eyes growing larger and
larger, beginning to brim over in their slow, exasperating way.
"Ed Fenton will be glad to entertain you on the way home." I
don't know why I wanted to hurt her, but I was pleased when she tried
to slap me, the tears really falling now. Why wouldn't she admit that
it was all over! I caught her wrist and said, "I'll come back. I'm sorry."
"I'm
sorry," she protested. "I never say anything right. I never
understand anything."
"And I'm not sorry at all. 'An aged man is but a paltry thing ...
unless soul clap its hands and sing. .. .' What would you like me to sing,
Mrs. Somers?" He took her by the arm and drew her off, beginning
some old vaudeville tune I did not recognize. She was laughing before
they were out of hearing, and I thought a little ruefully that she seldom
laughed with me.
In my own room, I saw the bundle of Hank's poems on my bed,
beside my already packed suitcase; the summer was almost over, and
I knew I would have to go back to the party after all.
But by the time I arrived, the party was impenetrable to me. I
saw neither Hank nor Judith, not even Fenton, only an endless surging
of people I knew barely or not at all; some of them were already drunk,
laughing uproariously at the ritual repetitions of jokes I had never
known, while the sober ones discussed politics in the loud, inflexible
voices of those arguing not to convince but to be overheard. One earnest
youngster was even insisting to his girl, "You can't talk about 'oysters'
and 'sensitive plants' in a vacuum. What's the
class basis
of bourgeois
aestheticism, that's the point." But when I stood near them hopefully,
he only glared, annoyed and not recognizing me.
The points and instances that were being raised everywhere were
sickeningly familiar to me, the warmed-over sophistries of fifteen years
of Communist apologetics, giving me the sense of being served again a
mess I had vomited up years before. I moved in my loneliness (only
a moment ago everyone was clapping and crowding around me) from
room to room through the three apartments of that shabby lodging
house, in and out of which the party sprawled. It was like moving in
a dream through the recollections of one's youth, powerless to change
a single regretted idiocy. Powerless!
I would find Hank, give him his poems and leave. Finis. I came
upon him finally in the yard, also alone and leaning against a tree, with
a can of beer tilted to his lips. I took the beer from his hand and
finished it.
