PULL DOWN VANITY!
365
"Don't be churlish, boy! We
all
love you." He drew me to
him,
breathing
his
old, thin, whisky-soured breath into my face, and
pulling Judith up with the other arm to complete a symbolic group.
"We
all
love each other- we Chosen People. No
goyim
here. I speak
spiritually, of course."
I was too exasperated by then even to wonder if his compulsive
anti-Semitism were real or merely a cold device to betray me into
anger; and anyhow Judith was leaning forward across his chest, look–
ing at me for the first time. Her eyes were astonishingly black under
the pallid high forehead, the silver blond hair woven into two thick
braids; a furry wet black, as
if
she were at the point of weeping, or
had just reopened them after some splendid climax of desire.
"I wouldn't have known you were Jewish-I mean, not from
your looks," she said indistinctly, disengaging herself from Fenton;
but she blushed as she said it, and when I did not answer, added,
"Excuse me!"
Meanwhile, however, Chuck Bligh had introduced himself be–
tween Fenton and me, laying a palm on each of our shoulders, and
crying out in obvious contentment, "But just wait till you meet the
others- There's Miss Manfred, she's Commercial Fiction-and Fleet–
wood Demby, the novelist, you'll like
him!
I can't tell you what it
means to hear some real intellectual talk again after the cultural fast
of the winter. Real Talk! We must have some more! Mter a day
with the old biddies, sweating over hot poetry and criticism all day,"
he laughed weakly at his own joke, "we can relax over a glass of
beer, let down our hair."
"I don't drink beer," I said.
"And I," Fenton winked broadly at
all
of us, "consider it a
more important part of my duties to relax.with some of the younger
writers after the formal sessions. Malt does more than Milton can-"
He walked over to the desk where Judith had sat down again before
a typewriter, leaning over until his mean, greenish eyes were on a
level with hers. She laid one hand, a little awkward and too large,
over the exposed part of her breast, as
if
to shield it. "I made my
attitude on this point clear in one of my letters to you, Bligh."
"Naturally, naturally," Bligh answered. "And now for the forms
-no America without wood-pulp you know." With a great pretense
of contempt, he fell to the administrative detail. And
it
was then
that I made my absurd and pointless claim.
