PULL
DOWN VANITYI
367
though I could not have said precisely why, I had the sense of
having been somehow deceived.
Certainly, I had no intention of saying anything further to her
or anyone else there; and the rest, too, seemed unwilling to talk.
Even Fenton had apparently been overwhelmed by the insolence of
my claim, and Bligh dismayed by Fenton's silence.
"And your wife," Judith went on nervously, "I would have
guessed she would look like that. Wouldn't you have just known it,
Chuck? She's so pretty!" She said it smugly, out of the security of
her own superior beauty, but without malice--in simple condes·
CeIlSlon.
Mae
is,
of course, anything but good-looking, though there
is
something warm and thickly sensual about her that appeals especially
to gentiles. My former wife, Eileen, on the other hand,
is
a real
shiksa,
who possessed once and still possesses, I guess, a kind of bloodless,
nervous charm-to which I had fled as another aspect of that anti–
New York America, that utopia of non-Jewishness defined by rodeos
and ranch-type houses with picture windows. But all this you
will
doubtless understand if you have read my long poem in dactyls,
"Passover in Santa Fe."
"Seven children. I never thought you had it in you. Congratula–
tions, boy." Fenton had shaken his head doubtfully, looking from
my gum-soled pale blue tennis shoes, up the precise crease of my
linen pants to the dandyish cowboy shirt with the discreetly em–
broidered yoke. I could see he despised me for refusing to look like
the writers of
his
generation, to whom their sloppy rags had seemed
the uniform of a disorder they called freedom. "You must be very
happily married."
"I am," I answered, pretending to ignore the wink which he
directed over my shoulder to Judith. "I am!"
Judith, meanwhile, had pretended to busy herself at the filing
cabinet near the door, and lifting her head only a little as we passed
her on the way out, she whispered to me,"I hate him, too!"
Her hands were too big, her waist too thick, her mouth merely
petulant, I told myself; and she was stupid, hopelessly stupid, with
her coos of admiration over my supposed family. But I knew that
she was the most beautiful girl I had ever met, and I was annoyed
at wanting her for so banal a reason. How sure I had been during
