64
PARTISAN REVIEW
She tried to return to her work. But now she noticed that he
had slumped a little in his chair, that his legs, limbered a little,
were crossed, and his fingers linked themselves loosely in his lap.
And now he was watching her, so that she began to feel, more un–
bearably, his presence. And she rose suddenly to escape it, furious
with herself, yet unable precisely to fathom her anger. Insolent, she
thought, he's an insolent. . . . But she checked herself quickly be–
cause the epithet was distasteful to her, it was a word she never per–
mitted herself to use. It was a word outrageous and vile to her.
"I'll be back in a few minutes," she told him.
"If
Dean Hark–
ness comes while I'm gone, you wait before you go in. You wait
until I come back."
He grinned again. "Yes, ma'am," he said. "I'll wait for you."
Suddenly she realized that she had been wrong, that it wasn't
insolence. Why shouldn't he consider himself a cipher, she asked
herself. And with a wry and dramatic irony, she paused to reflect.
But aren't we all, aren't we all just that-not only they. And she
thought that she, too, in the unfulfilled continuity of her days, was
another, more poignant zero, because dimly, in the storehouse of
recollection there had been something-love, hope, unaccepted pas–
sion?-an iridescent thing, but tinsel. And caught there with him,
contemplating her, his eyes insolent-no, not insolent, but compas–
sionate now-or was it her own compassion that she saw in them?–
with the sulphurous dusk curling desolately, sadly over the campus
outside the window, into the room, she felt choked with an inco–
herent awareness of her plight, as though some strange disparity of
the moment, of the boy there, of the still room, of herself, had
coalesced to strike her now, at this moment, and fill her involuntarily
with tears that would not spill, with bitterness that would not lessen.
"Yes," she repeated, moving toward the door, "you wait till
I come back."
But when she returned, he was gone.
She tried not to think of him, but her memory would not forget
him. With that peculiar perversity which keeps the trivial, the non–
sensical fresh, it kept him with her, so that she would see him on the
campus and the recognition would have the impact of the familiar,
and she found herself watching the door, almost waiting for him
to come back. And there was the paradox, that by describing himself
cipher, he was no longer cipher, but an existence that intruded into
