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PARTISAN REVIEW
came very formally tragic, because the strain of pride was enormous.
She held her head up, and the tension of that moment gave her face
some of the cold remoteness of a Bronzino lady. She had not yet
begun to cry, but the whole thing was becoming
fantastic.
At the word "love" Craven nodded with an expression of clarity
in
his
eyes. "Love" resolved that uncanny sense of disproportion,
that blurring he had felt a few minutes before. Now everything was
more predictable, more symmetrical. Craven himself did not consider
"love" particularly relevant; at least, not now, not so early in their
affair. Later, when he became-as he knew he would-impossible,
then it would be time to bring in "love," as a means of making
Lucy stay, or go, or do whatever was necessary. Craven nodded only
because he was reassured to see how little Lucy really had changed.
He was sure now that it was a fantasy of hers that she knew what
"making love" was. How else explain her behavior? The situation,
indeed, was classic in its clarity.
"You're very rigid," Craven observed. "You have too much
control, you repress your feelings, look what you do to yourself,"
he said coldly. But he could not reverse Lucy's terrible intensity, and
their argument fell back into a weary grotesque silence.
What Lucy tried to say was that she didn't feel herself enchanted
and she had to be. It was so very necessary to have that feeling,
she thought, but difficult to explain. Craven was so much older than
she was that she couldn't tell him he didn't enchant her. And there
was nothing she could do, because he was not at all enchanted–
and he didnJt want to be.
As
she struggled with these contradictions,
the drab room where they were sitting echoed with his writhing
words; and Lucy heard herself described as "a cold little narcissist"
entrapped by "fantasies." She was counseled to scrutinize her "boring
rigidity," her "excessive rationality."
The subject of these attributes moved from the paisley-covered
bed to sit in Craven's old leather chair and smoke a cigarette. There
was only coldness in the Italian intellectual's room now. Naturally,
there had been no "love" before, but now even that earlier peak
of mutual interest had quite fallen off. The evening was now quite
over for
him,
so he became rude, caustic, contemptuous. Such pre–
cipitate failures were unnerving to Craven, and he could sustain the
belief that the failure was Lucy's only by making her sure he hated
ber, which he rapidly proceeded to do. She, however, thought that
