240
PARTISAN REVIEW
Lucy tried to decide whether to say he was an old drunk or
pretend she was interested in him. They expected
something-so
she
exaggerated because that was easier. She also wanted him to have
a lot of people at his last two lectures, which would be a chore be–
cause half the house was away for the week end. But Binky and
Cookie and Kappy and Bunchy would all spread her extravagant
report, so heavy with a kind of girlish admiration she no longer quite
felt. Still, it would make everyone go to the lecture on German
Baroque, the one that Craven predicted would be so bad. It didn't
occur to Lucy, as she went over the old litany of contorted awe and
worship, that then she would never be able to account for
his
letters
if they ever came.
This was the situation of Lucy Doob's meeting with Donald
Craven, this muddle of motives and fantasies and lies and despairing
spirit.
As
for her, she thought, for instance, that the Plauts' life was
rather exciting and
terribly
unusual. She thought it was a sign of
deeper love than anything she had seen that the Plauts quarreled
openly, attacked each other, threatened violence; that they were rude,
impolite, unfaithful, and weary of each other. All of their friends
were just like them, and Lucy thought it was a wonderful way to
be. She had never seen drinking like that before. The Plauts drank
as if they were cultivating their wounds, and to Lucy, who had
known only polite social drinking or none at all, this seemed so
honest and forthright, that she came to distrust drinking which was
not equally desperate. Donald Craven was a part of this new view
she had of people, this new sense of the possibilities
in
personal rela–
tions, and she thought she was beginning to come close to the heart
of meaning.
It was good that Lucy learned to lie, because Craven replied to
her letters irregularly. In spite of that night and the promise of in–
terested excitement, Craven's glow for Lucy faded before the glare
of her inexorable college life. There was also someone at Amherst,
and someone at Columbia, and a Dartmouth Green Key who
didn't
make milk punch. Craven figured more in Lucy's conversation, but
less in her thoughts, although during the next few months she was
heard to repeat some of
his
opinions as her own; but there was noth–
ing irregular about this. Their relationship-or whatever it should be
called, no word is exactly right-floundered, rose and fell, promised
more than it gave. There were letters, appointments made and
