364
PARTISAN REVIEW
barely visible fuzz of golden
hair,
and those plump breasts so ob–
viously constrained by the low-cut summer dress. I could scarcely
keep from touching her.
"Judy says Edna was Irish, Milton," he informed me gravely.
"She's a bright girl, our Judith-not the mere office slavey she
seems. She's working for a degree in philosophy-and she writes
poetry, too." He kept staring at the girl who squirmed satisfactorily
under
his
quizzical glance. "You may be interested to learn that her
favorite poet is Milton Amsterdam-and quite right, too. Don't you
think he's pretty, Judith?"
His mere appearance had surprised and distressed me-the
animal healthiness of the presumably dying man behind the ragged
musketeer's beard that made
him
look so different from the clean–
shaven, tough, pathetic youth of the unchanging portrait on all
his
book jackets. He was wearing a pair of outrageously dirty seersucker
pants, too long for
his
bandy legs, and a tight green sport shirt open
far enough down to reveal the mat of dirty gray hair on his chest.
He seemed all aging muscle and ragged hair and boisterous malice.
"Come now, come now! You
do
think he's pretty, don't you?
Let's not be shy, baby!"
"I like
him,"
she managed to say in a muted, pleasantly raucous
voice. She did not look at me.
"She likes you, boy. Don't you think he looks like Truman
Capote-something soft and charmingly rotten-gothic-"
"Oh,
no!"
she protested; but I did not trouble to add my own
dissent, the comparison was so mischievously pointless. My wife, in
our happier moments, used to tell me that I resembled the actor John
Garfield-a comparison I have never particularly relished, but one
whose justice I have to recognize.
"An
east side Truman Capote-"
Fenton persisted; and as I made my first effort to speak, he rose
and walked over to me, clasping me in a sudden show of affection
about the shoulders. "Milton, I've been meaning to write to you for
months. I like your newer stuff-that curtail sonnet of yours, 'The
Plangence of the Beloved'-it's the best short poem since Emily
Dickinson! "
"I don't even know what a curtail sonnet is," I managed to say,
thinking that he had probably made up the term to annoy me; but
I regretted immediately my awkward protest.
