62
PARTISAN REVIEW
She did not look up when the shadow fell across her typewriter,
thinking with habit, he can wait, as she had always made the most
importunate wait. And when she looked up finally, there was nothing
there to have pricked an expectancy, .as these days there seemed al–
ways to be nothing, nothing. Merely another student, in a rough
tweed coat, the collar still pulled up, the eyes waiting with atavistic
patience because the skin of the high-cheeked face was deep brown,
the hair cork-screwed black. She saw the long fingers with their
purplish nails, a little prehensile, touching her desk, the hand edged
with the pinkness of palm, and she said, "Yes?" the tone impersonal,
the tone with which she always greeted the most importunate, that
which pricked a faint expectancy that, these days, materialized into
nothing.
"Could I see the Dean?" he asked.
"Do you have an appointment?" And she noticed that the last
typed word on the paper in her machine was misspelled, "decieve,"
and the transposed letters suffused her suddenly with confusion, with
dismay.
"If
you haven't an appointment, you'll have to wait," and
she reached for the eraser. "Dean Harkness is out anyway. I can't
say when he'll be back...."
There was no movement from the figure, but she still felt the
shadow of it over her desk, over her typewriter, over herself.
"I could wait...."
She looked up and the face, striking her as being singularly im–
passive, took on an identity of its own, the eyes wide-set, the nose
flaring out of its bridgelessness, the lips like slices of fruit in the
darkness of the skin. Even when they're young, she thought, they
seem ageless. Or are they eternally young?
"What's your name?" she asked, taking up her pencil now and
poising it over the scratch pad. "You can wait if you like, but it
may even be an hour."
"McKinnon. James McKinnon."
She wrote it down and watched him walk to a chair and seat
himself, pulling at his trousers to preserve the crease, and she noticed
his
polished shoes, and the way he sat, poker-stiff, with the feet
planted unremittingly apart and the pink-edged hands cupping almost
tensely the knees. Then she looked back at "decieve," and she became
unaware of his presence.
