A FALSE NOTE
61
by what she did not know. She had skillfully parried the attempts
of a married man to inveigle her into an affair, and a graduate
student who needed a mother substitute she had indignantly sent
packing. The people she had in for cocktails, for buffet suppers,
for evening talk over bourbon highballs, they were always the same
people, the same faces . And although she did not know them well
(Whom do we ever really know? she a sked herself what she con–
sidered that foolish question), she knew enough about them to find
them insufferably boring. Conversation invariably stultified into gos–
sip or inanities, or on the rare occasions when it rose to higher terrain,
it
rose with none of the leaven of wit or novelty. It
all
ends in para–
dox, anyway, became a catch phrase for her when ideas entered
her head that unsettled her emotionally, or when emotions trespassed
in her heart that were intellectually frightening. And at thirty-two,
she began to feel old. I'm old before my time, she bemoaned in com–
forting self-pity, and she scanned her glass for the telltale signs–
the white hairs in the dark scalp, the gossamer lines about the mouth
that the lipstick always seemed to make garish. And her eyes seemed
less halcyon light, darkened, she thought, by the strain of trying to
see her image clearly, and why can't I see, why haven't I understood,
she would ask herself with almost a twinge of anguish.
"You need a vacation," Audrey said, .as they smoked cigarettes
over coffee in the tea room where they frequently had their dinner.
And around them she saw the precious boys, the bespectacled, mother–
bereft graduate students, the lonely women who made the genteel
clatter that seemed to have become the accompaniment to her life.
"Why don't you get away for a while?"
"Oh, I couldn't," she said. "I couldn't do that." And acknowl–
edging that something was happening, that the vision had somehow
clouded, she said, "It's the winter, the cold. I've always hated
the cold."
But she knew that it was more than the cold. It seemed a
threshold from which to look back was to regret, and to look forward
was to mourn. And the November slid into winter, imperceptibly,
each day like the last, and the questions which she could not answer
seemed more shrill, as the voice is more shrill in the suddenly silenced
room.
