446
PARTISAN REVIEW
pain with the same aroused indiscriminate love that was washing over
Hank and me. "Oh, my poor baby, she's so hot, so hot! Mama's poor
baby. Hank, take Susie up to the Burnhams. They have a screened-in
porch," she explained, turning to me, "it's so much cooler. But sit with
her, Hank, until she falls asleep again. Don't leave her screaming!"
She stared at me as she said this in terrible openness to be sure I knew
why she was doing it, to be
sure.
"You'll have to make a bottle first." He clearly did not want to
go, but seemed helpless before her, abject in the face of her superior
passion, or perhaps ashamed for the pang of jealousy he felt, resolved
to make it up to her.
"Certainly, dear." She stooped to kiss him on the nose on her way
out, and disappeared into the tiny dim alcove of the kitchen, where
we could hear her moving about behind the grease-stained, flowered
curtain.
During her absence, Hank turned to me twice, opening his mouth
and raising his hand in the gesture of one about to enter a plea, but
he finally said nothing.
No sooner was he out of the door, than Judith flung herself down
beside me, as one throws away something of little worth; wordlessly, she
engaged me, her mouth on and over mine, that dark insistent tongue
probing, her teeth thrust against mine almost painfully. We fell side–
ways on to the rug, she pressed into me so that her whole lower body
touched mine at every point; and she ground into me the soft belly,
the hard pelvic bone, circle and thrust, circle and thrust, with an im–
personal force that was more an assault than an embrace. Though my
hands and lips were moving up and down her, I could not really touch
her; it was as if she were masturbating alone in an unknowable place
toward which she ran headlong, her breath faltering painfully and her
heart pounding so hard between us that for a moment I feared she
might faint or die.
It seems now inconceivable that I did not take her completely
there on the floor; but I was afraid that Hank might return at any
moment, and besides, a kind of coldness had begun to grow in me at
the madness, the cruelty of her heat. Her motive seemed a force beyond
passion, a kind of voluptuousness of hate aimed at destroying behind
the image of the spoiled poet or the beloved Jew, behind any me how–
ever genuine, my maleness, my essential power-or even some larger
impersonal potency that I shared also with Hank, and which she could
not attain.
"Look," I tried to say at one point, "your husband wilI-" But
it struck me as funny to be worrying about the returning husband like
